A flurry of litigation challenging the constitutionality of lethal injection has placed a spotlight on growing evidence that condemned inmates may not be properly anesthetized and therefore experience excruciating pain during executions.
Although it has become the predominant method of execution around the country, lethal injection was initially adopted three decades ago without scientific or medical studies, on the recommendation of an Oklahoma state legislator who wanted a more humane procedure.
Since then, objections have arisen in many of the 37 other states that adapted Oklahoma's procedures, including California, where a federal judge has scheduled a two-day hearing next week on altering or even eliminating the state's lethal injection methods.
So far this year, executions have been delayed in California, Florida, Maryland and Missouri -- and in three federal cases -- because of litigation challenging the use of lethal injections. Cases from Kentucky, Louisiana and Tennessee are pending, and unsuccessful challenges have been waged in Indiana, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma and Texas.
Although it offends some death penalty proponents that the state is obliged to limit inmates' suffering during execution, the Supreme Court in its 1976 decision reinstating the death penalty cautioned that officials must avoid "the unnecessary and wanton infliction of pain." The problem with the three-stage lethal injection drug procedure is that it may mask rather than prevent pain, critics contend.
The first drug administered, the sedative sodium thiopental, is meant to deaden pain, the second, a paralytic, to immobilize the prisoner and the third, potassium chloride, to stop the heart.
However, sedative dosages, especially as administered by untrained prison personnel, have been found inadequate to anesthetize inmates, according to testimony in some of the cases. And the paralytic prevents them from expressing the intense pain of the heart-stopping chemical, physicians say.
In a study to be released today, Human Rights Watch reported on more than a dozen executions in which inmates appeared to suffer.
For example, in North Carolina in 2003, a prisoner started to convulse, sat up and gagged during his execution. He appeared to be choking and his arms seemed to struggle under the sheet, the report said.
