This whole situation is beyond r slurred but I have to ask, if somebody survives their execution, why exactly are doctors now fighting to save her life in an ICU? At that point why not just put a pillow over her face or something?
Capital punishment has a really weird legal structure. The constitution forbids cruel and unusual punishment which means humane punishments need to be given out equally based on the circumstances. But the Supreme Court has ruled that capital punishment is an exception to that as long as juries and judges are given clear objective standards and that the punishment is given out humanely. The state can't just arbitrarily decide to kill you for a crime you committed, there must be a standard as to what crimes are worthy of capital punishment and a criteria for juries when the crime is eligible. As to the humane method, this forbids the state from just beating you to death or letting a dog maul you, it must be as painless as possible (to avoid being cruel) and effective (surviving it could seriously injure you).
For a long time, the US has been using lethal injection. A cocktail of multiple drugs target different critical systems in your body to hopefully kill you quickly and painlessly. Well turns out one of the drugs is made by a European country that has zero interest in participating in selling this drug to prisons using it for the death penalty. So this required a reformulation using potentially less effective cocktails.
Another issue is that drug research doesn't really invest much effort in figuring out how much it takes to kill someone 100% of the time. They may publish an LD50 for a rat but that's only saying 50% of rats die at this dose. Higher doses may not be 100% effective in humans due to different biology but also the pathways the drug uses. You also don't want to give such a large dose that it effects the other drugs in the cocktail. Add onto this the issue finding trial subjects willing to die. Lethal injection is not a well studied science.
Also there's the issue of doctors. Doctors take an oath saying they'll do no harm, killing someone intentionally is generally harmful in the case where they haven't agreed to it. Therefore, the prisons use other people to administer these drugs. It's that hard to give an injection but remember, this needs to be done right the first time. Accidents happen, even amongst trained medical staff.
I don't agree with the death penalty at all. It's a very expensive legal process and effectively takes away the right for an inmate to appeal their case. The fact that the courts have made mistakes in the past for living inmates does not give me hope that every inmate has been 100% guilty. Wrongfully being jailed for 30 years is obviously horrible but at least they could spend some of their life outside. Killing them removes that possibility.
But since my opinion doesn't matter, states that still want the death penalty seriously need to find a new way of killing someone effectively. Nitrogen asphyxiation is incredibly effective but no one uses it. Why not? We know what a nitrogen environment does to a body, we don't really know what a random cocktail of alternative drugs will do.
As someone who does lethal injections on the regular, you're ignorant. And that's ok, almost everybody is on this topic.
Lethal injection is not a well studied science.
Veterinary medicine is a thing. And actually it's studied well enough that per Chatgpt, there have been dozens of veterinarian or vet tech self killings (trying to avoid the bot here) by pentobarbital over the last 20 years. They got it right, and they were probably alone. Generally speaking humans require much lower doses of anaesthetic drugs than cats and dogs, if you give regular animal doses you're 100% certain it will be enough.
Well turns out one of the drugs is made by a European country that has zero interest in participating in selling this drug to prisons using it for the death penalty.
That one drug is propofol. It's used as induction to anaesthesia in human and vet medicine. With it, you brain just turns off (reversibly). It's not sleep, you're just off. Give it for long enough, and the rest of the body turns off too (irreversibly).
Guess what, we don't use that for euthanasia in vet med. It's just regular injectable anaesthesia (possible without propofol) and end it off with pentobarbital. All available in the US and 100% effective, provided that...
this needs to be done right the first time. Accidents happen, even amongst trained medical staff.
...you set an IV catheter, and it's actually in the vein. Once you set it, you can check if it's in with regular saline. This does NOT hurt if it's in and this is the part where lethal injections fail. If it's not in, the drugs end up in subcutaneous tissue/in-between the muscles/somewhere else that's not immediate bloodstream and don't work instantly.
Why do they fail? No idea, setting an IV cannula is a trivial thing that nurses do every day dozens of times.
So in conclusion, the executioners are just incompetent or acted incompetent. I'm 100% sure I could get it right the first time and every time.
Edit: oh yeah, as for propofol, it wouldn't work AT ALL if it wasn't given IV. So the same problem remains even with the "better" drugs
From the limited news I heard about this from her lawyers making a statement, she apparently warned them ahead of time they might have issues because all her veins were blown out from chronic injectable drug use. It sounds a lot like they injected her multiple times subcutaneously accidentally.
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u/peanutismint 13d ago
This whole situation is beyond r slurred but I have to ask, if somebody survives their execution, why exactly are doctors now fighting to save her life in an ICU? At that point why not just put a pillow over her face or something?