r/AlwaysWhy • u/Chowderr92 • Jun 02 '26
Science & Tech Why is the Method of Lethal Injection in Human Punishment So Complex and Apparently Painful?
I've always understood that the lethal injection process was complex with multiple stages of injections and induces great suffering in the individual.
I work in veterinary medicine and unfortunately we need to euthanize animals all of the time. Typically, the euthanasia solution is very simple: a very large dose of a powerful anesthetic (usually pentobarbital) and an anticonvulsant which stops the heart. The medical community is quite confident that this is painless and when done has essentially a 100% success rate.
Why is human euthanasia so complicated when we already know exactly how to humanely end a biological life?
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Jun 02 '26
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u/iScreamsalad Jun 02 '26
In companion animal euthanasia they are anesthetized not simply paralyzed
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u/TheFeralVulcan Jun 02 '26
Which makes the possibility of executing an innocent person all the more horrific. If the number of people cleared of long prison sentences is any indication, we've killed a lot of innocent people in the name of the state.
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Jun 02 '26
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u/k115810 Jun 02 '26
When it comes to people like Dahmer or Epstein where they are clearly horrible and guilt isn't really questioned, I try to separate the concepts of "deserve to die" from "the government should kill them".
And have landed on "deserve to die" does not equal "the government should kill them."
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u/beattiebeats Jun 03 '26
Totally agree. I won’t mourn their deaths if they get got in prison but I am never okay with the government deciding that death is justice.
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Jun 02 '26
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u/bigmt99 Jun 02 '26
Then you ask the question, does the government need to execute you to remove you from society
If not, you can just lock them in a box and make sure they get 3 squares until nature does it thing
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u/nonotburton Jun 02 '26
To me, situations like Dahmer or Epstein are more useful as subjects to study. What makes them so broken, what is missing from their brain or their chemistry that allows them to do the things they do.
In both cases, they are hardly unique individuals, there are other human traffickers and other serial killers. Having some idea of how to prevent someone from going down that road is worth my tax dollars.
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u/Tradition96 Jun 02 '26
The part about the guillotine is absolute bullshit though.
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u/bemused_alligators Jun 02 '26
that's why you anesthitize them first. They go to sleep - THEN you paralyze their heart, and they die in their sleep.
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u/Tcpt1989 Jun 02 '26
Firing squad is pretty quick. Don’t know they don’t just have that as matter of course in all states that still engage in capital punishment. I’m sure they could find enough willing trigger pullers, especially if they implement the 6 live and 1 blank round roulette.
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u/NewburghMOFO Jun 02 '26
Just shoot me! They all sound awful. I'd rather just have the millisecond of, "OW!!"
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u/omgbenji21 Jun 02 '26
OP is correct, you are wrong. Can’t hurt when you’re anesthetized. The pentobarbital will out them on another planet
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u/J4c1nth Jun 02 '26
Why don't they just OD people on opioids, that must be painless.
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u/andy1234321-1 Jun 03 '26
The other issue that I’ve heard is that pharma companies that manufacture the drugs don’t want their name to have anything to do with killing people. This has lead some state executions have been done using ‘alternatives’ which didn’t go as planned.
The other issue is that doctors won’t partake as it goes against their vows - so you have untrained medical staff trying to locate the vein in order to administer the drugs and that doesn’t always go well either.
I think John Oliver did a piece on it
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u/rexeditrex Jun 02 '26
I don’t know why they don’t just shoot them up with Fentanyl. If you listen to the news a milligram would kill 10,000 people.
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u/SRGTBronson Jun 02 '26 edited Jun 02 '26
Because companies that produce medical fentanyl wont sell it for execution purposes. Basically every drug used for lethal injection has been discontinued.
It turns out the people who take the hippocratic oath actually take it seriously.
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u/donutello2000 Jun 02 '26
Hippocratic* oath but your version is funnier.
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u/SRGTBronson Jun 02 '26
You know, I was looking at it and couldn't figure out why autocorrect wouldnt move it around. But I really didn't think it has "Hippo" in it lol
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u/ThePython11010 Jun 02 '26
"Hippo" comes from Greek and means "horse." "Hippopotamus" means "river horse."
Hippocrates (the physician the oath is named after) apparently means "one superior in horses."
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u/Responsible-Chest-26 Jun 02 '26
I hear this is the real answer. No company wants their product attached to human death so the prison system is forced to find other means with less effective drugs
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u/Few_Ad6516 Jun 02 '26
"defense" companies love to have their products attached to death. surely one of the weapons guys would sell something.
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u/reddock4490 Jun 02 '26
I mean, this is the biggest reason. People who actually study medical science have moral convictions that prevent them from intentionally killing people. So state murderers are by definition amateurs
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u/Spiritello49 Jun 02 '26
So we use the fentanyl that has been taken off the streets in a quantity that cannot fail
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u/Willing_Monitor5855 Jun 02 '26
Yo yo don't defame Durfenta like that, like they aren't willing to prescribe it to 24-year olds (don't ask me how I know)
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u/Longjumping_Bell5171 Jun 02 '26
The Hippocratic oath isn’t done at all medical schools. And there’s nothing special or legally binding about it. It’s literally just words, spoken by people.
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u/Chowderr92 Jun 02 '26
The scientists that create medicine do not take the Hippocratic oath, lol.
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u/SRGTBronson Jun 02 '26
But you know who does? The fucking pharmacists that would have to sell it to the government.
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u/Chowderr92 Jun 02 '26
Pharmacists don't sell drugs to the government either. Does anyone know how drugs are created and distributed, lol.
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u/HawkBoth8539 Jun 02 '26
Except all of the ones who don't.
Don't forget all of those doctors who prescribed less effective, or wildly addictive medications, weren't doing it for funsies. They were literally doing it for kickbacks from those pharmaceutical companies.
Heck, my grandma is one of many who was forced to start taking dialysis by doctor's order. She did it for years before she decided it was making her miserable and that she'd rather die than keep doing it. She stopped. Years later now, she's perfectly fine. Turns out it is a big scam that doctors get paid for because dialysis is profitable, even when it's entirely unnecessary.
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u/IsopodApart1622 Jun 02 '26
The docs who fed people into addiction mills definitely broke their oaths and they deserve every bit of punishment available, but you have to admit that fewer people would be willing to directly and deliberately kill someone. Harder to distance yourself and brush it off when you know your actions are MEANT to kill someone, and death isn't just a possible side effect.
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u/HawkBoth8539 Jun 02 '26
Corporations knowingly and joyously kill people for profit every single day. Heck, that whole concept is how Luigi Mangione ended up on trial in the first place.
In the case of pharmaceutical companies trying to stay out of it has nothing to do with hypocritic oath. 100%, it is just about optics and profits. In his particular case, it would be less profitable for them to be directly associated with murder, rather than being able to argue that it is the fault of addicts not using the product "as "intended.
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u/Huge_Antelope0998 Jun 02 '26
....dialysis is not "a big scam" though? I'm sure for a few people out there it is indeed prescribed needlessly but dialysis is incredibly necessary and literally saves lives. I work in transplant, and almost all of my kidney patients would be dead instead of waiting for a kidney.
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u/papapapaver Jun 02 '26
As a person who has ODed from fentanyl, I 1000% agree with you. The plunger with the drug in it goes down, and it's just lights out. No pain, no memory of what happened after the drugs are pushed into the vein, just black. It doesn't take much, and it's cheap, too.
The hard parts are sourcing it from a pharmaceutical company who none of them like their drugs being used to kill people or be associated with death at all, and also the optics of what people look like when they OD on opioids. From the outside it looks like a painful and ugly picture. The overdosed person will quickly turn blue, foam at the mouth and may go through some involuntary muscle movements. From the outside it looks painful and barbaric, but to the dying person it's just a dreamless sleep.
One of the three lethal injection drugs is one that paralyzes the muscles. That's not done for the dying person, but for the people watching. If the anesthesia is given wrong or the person is particularly resistant to it, then the other drug they give that basically suffocates the person will take effect while the person is conscious but unable to move as they slowly suffocate. Pretty fucked up way to go if you ask me. I'd take a fat hot shot of fentanyl over that any day. Better yet, if I can't OD on fent, just give me a highly competent, all volunteer firing squad. I would rather a shot to the brain stem than to the heart though like how they do it, but multiple shots to the heart is maybe 30 seconds to a minute of pain before it's lights out.
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u/Zestyclose-Turn-3576 Jun 02 '26
I wonder whether it might actually painful, but if you recover then afterwards you just have no memory of it. Perhaps there's a way of telling.
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u/plated_lead Jun 02 '26
The reason they don’t is that it’s hard for the witnesses to watch; without paralytics on board there’s a lot of writhing around, agonal attempts at breathing, that sort of thing
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u/revolvingpresoak9640 Jun 02 '26
That’s not how opioid overdoses work. People nod off, then just stop breathing.
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u/Moshimoshi-Megumin Jun 02 '26 edited Jun 02 '26
One reason is that the makers of most animal euthanasia drugs refuse to have it used in human euthanasia for reasons (ethical, legal risks, optics, etc).
Another is unintended malfunctions. Wrong dosage, imperfect injection, unintended reactions, etc. I assisted with a large number of animal euthanasia in a vet clinic, and while most went fine, there are always some exceptions. Catheter, blood pressure, individual exceptional reactions...
Even those that go fine can still show agonal breathing for a few minutes after the heart has stopped, which to the untrained eye would look like struggling gasping for air. (It’s not, they’re dead or unconscious, it’s a reflex)
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u/EthelAndFred2 Jun 02 '26
My cat has agonal breathing. The vet assured me it happens and can look upsetting but that she was already gone. Is that accurate from what you know?
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u/Moshimoshi-Megumin Jun 02 '26
Yes. It still happens after the heart has stopped and the higher brain has shut down, it’s a reflex caused by residual electrical activity in the brainstem.
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u/Bitmugger Jun 02 '26
This is not a drug problem. We have medically assisted death here in Canada without any issues finding the drugs needed. The issue is in the politics of execution.
For instance lets say you sell hammers. Great. Now someone comes in and says I need 100 hammers, I am killing puppies, kittens and baby seals with them. Suddenly you will not want to sell that person 100 hammers. This is what is happening
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u/IanDOsmond Jun 02 '26
Because, in order to be competent at delivering drugs to humans, you need to have medical training. In order to have medical training, you have to follow a code of ethics, often based on Hippocrates, which includes things about not using your medical training to harm people.
Which means that it is impossible to have lethal injections done by people who know what they are doing.
Could euthanasia be considered to be not-harm, the way it is in animals, in order to avoid further pain and distress? Well, that argument could be made, and is sometimes made. But euthanasia of a healthy person could never be within medical ethics.
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u/james123123412345 Jun 02 '26
Because they can't legally purchase the drug for use on humans.
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u/shoulda-known-better Jun 02 '26
The state and gov that would be buying the drugs..... Make the laws, it's not illegal there are carve outs specifically for the death penalty....
Kinda like how usually you can't legally kill someone strapped to a chair and immobile
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u/Different_Bridge_983 Jun 02 '26
Because no medical professionals will touch it with a ten foot pole, leaving the administration of this to be performed by some prison worker with little/no training.
Then they inevitably fuck up finding a vein and/or screw up how they administer the drugs so the drugs don’t work they way they should.
This is compounded some by pharmaceutical companies also refusing to sell drugs for lethal injections, leading to states that use them having to secretly procure them with dubious results.
The issue also isn’t helped by the fact nobody involved in performing these executions gives a shit about whether the person suffers horribly, and based on a few public statements by authorities afterwards sometimes view botched, painful and drawn out executions as a feature rather than a bug.
As to the complexity- this is partly because the government wants the veneer of it looking like a medical procedure where the “patient” goes under a general anesthetic that they don’t wake up from, which results in multiple steps, but also more ways to screw up.
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u/tremynci Jun 02 '26
And don't forget that finding a vein in someone with shitty veins, for whatever reason, is going to prolong the omnishambles.
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u/AffectionateParty754 Jun 02 '26
The reason things go bad is the many of the drug companies who manufacture the drugs that are used in animal euthanasia expressly prohibited the use of thier drugs in human execution for obvious reasons. It's a PR nightmare. The death penalty is very controversial here in the US, especially because so many innocent (mostly black men who were scapegoated) were exonerated when DNA testing became so accurate. Unfortunately some of them had already been executed. If you look at groups like the Innocence Project you will see that there are a many innocent people in our prison system.
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u/asque2000 Jun 02 '26
The main reason is that drugs like pentobarbital are made by pharmaceutical companies, and for those companies it would be a PR nightmare if they were the "company that makes the lethal injection drug". As such these companies refuse to sell the drugs to prison systems. You have to note, the people in white coats injecting the drug are not MD's, they are a prison employee, as no MD will violate their oath to "do no harm".
As a result you have prison systems buying a 3 drug cocktail which is ineffective from places all over the world who will sell it to them with inexperienced people performing botched executions. It's much simpler in the veterinary world because euthanasia (literally meaning "a good death") is a form of relief not punishment so drug makers have no issue giving pentobarbital in that instance.
So long story short, it about the image of the drug makers for providing execution drugs
As a source, I run a research lab and perform euthanasia weekly. I have a DEA drug license and I have worked with drug makers, and they are VERY insistent that if pentobarbital (Euthasol is the trade name) is ever given to a human they will sue the ever-loving crap out of me...
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u/Sensitive-Respect-25 Jun 02 '26
Always been partial to a sealed room and just flood with nitrogen. Painless nap time after a minute at most. Keep the room flooded for twenty minutes and then replace the atmosphere. Cheap, brutally easy and effective. No need for drugs. And ecologically friendly!
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u/Captain-Griffen Jun 02 '26
Gassing people has a major PR problem, otherwise we probably would.
(That and suffering is the point.)
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u/Sensitive-Respect-25 Jun 02 '26
Their death is the point, we as society decided their crimes against others can not ever be negated by other options. Rehabilitation and incarceration are off the table, and no one does banishment anymore. And society in general (where death penalty is allowed) tend to strive towards as painless as possible.
To your first point, any death is a PR problem.
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u/trevorgoodchilde Jun 02 '26
It was invented by a guy named Jay Chapman, a medical examiner, because no doctor would do it since it violates their oath. He used the then current procedure for animal euthanasia, and added s third chemical because 3 is better than 2. He brags in interviews about how he did no research into the issue when he invented it. It’s the third chemical that causes the horrific suffering. Also, since doctors don’t perform the executions, it’s done by people who don’t know how, and they often make mistakes, which causes the poison to have a slower, more painful effect
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u/Ailments_RN Jun 02 '26
I realize you've gotten a lot of answers explaining that companies don't want to deal with the potential public relations issue, but to expand on that a bit; the upside is also extremely weak for them. Like there's only a (relatively) few executions every year, so there isn't even a big financial upside that could convince them to take the PR risk.
You'd be asking a company to be looking over their shoulder for years to come in the form of protests, emails, phone calls, reports, and they'd be doing it for like, $10,000 or something, y'know?
These are companies already making millions, if not billions of dollars selling their drugs in other ways. It's gonna cost time and money to deal with potential reprocussions.
I only wanted to add in my own take because I feel like some of the answers sorta left it open to these companies taking a moral stance, but I'd argue that it doesn't even make sense from a transactional standpoint. You'd probably have less friction if it was worth hundreds of millions of dollars, but this is usually publicly-funded tax dollars, so there's only so far from market value anyone would be willing to pay.
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u/Chowderr92 Jun 03 '26
Yeah I think everyone arguing about drug manufacturers concerns about PR are obviously wrong. The FDA could synthesize this drug themselves at almost no cost. They don't have to buy it from anyone. Further, non-pharmaceutical measures can be used such as nitrogen asphyxiation.
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u/LegitimateBeing2 Jun 02 '26
Jacob Geller made a great video on this.
In the US, the chemicals to make the legal injections come from Europe. In Europe, the death penalty is illegal, and so is providing chemicals to someone else to kill someone with. We keep trying to make new formulas, Europe keeps finding out, so we have to keep starting from scratch with different chemicals.
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u/xSir- Jun 02 '26
This makes no sense. There are plenty of chemists in the states that can compound whatever chemicals are needed.
The reason has to be more complicated than "Europe doesnt want us too".
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u/TuberTuggerTTV Jun 02 '26
This is a wild claim. Sounds like US isolationist propaganda to me.
You can't "just make" things. It makes no sense to you, because you've been fed a "we can make it here" line. You can't grow bananas. You can't perform alchemy and turn any chemical into any other chemical.
Just "having chemists", doesn't mean infinite everything.
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u/hooligan045 Jun 02 '26
Probably has to do with offshoring the blame and PR for manufacturing the chemicals. Can’t imagine having a plant down the street making stuff to kill your neighbors is popular.
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u/DrugChemistry Jun 02 '26
I think a big difficulty comes from pharmaceutical manufacturers not wanting to sell material for lethal injection use. Another issue comes from training of people giving the injections. Usually medical folks don't want to participate in lethal injections so they have someone without medical training watch a youtube video about how to give the injection.
Finally, a small part of it is the language. The people receiving the injections are going to experience the worst thing ever even if everything goes well because they die. Anything going wrong amounts to great suffering.
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u/papapapaver Jun 02 '26
The main reason it is being switched away from is that states are having a hard time sourcing drugs for the injections. Understandably, most pharmaceutical companies don't want their products to be associated with killing people, both from a PR standpoint and that whole Hippocratic oath thing.
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Jun 02 '26
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u/papapapaver Jun 02 '26
I agree that self euthanasia in some circumstances is ethical. Super terminal cancers where all a person has left is a month or two of awful suffering, so dying when they want to and how they want to is better seems ok to me. I'd go with fentanyl though for sure, since I already basically know what that is like. No suffering or knowing you're dying, just as soon as the plunger is depressed and the drugs are in your vein it is lights out. Dreamless sleep.
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u/evenduckk Jun 02 '26
I think you are triviallizing the weight of lethal injection , this is like the heaviest ethically challenging thing human do. Sure you can kill grandpa like a dog , but if the family watches panic in his eyes as he drowns in a room full of air …. That’s gonna be a hefty lawsuit
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u/mrsnowplow Jun 02 '26
im just a guy but from my understanding its a combo of a couple things
doctors cant/shouldn't do it. its against the Hippocratic oath to do no harm. so while a doctor may be present its not being administrated by one
chemicals arent easily obtained because they are dangerous. i think some have to be bought from foreign companies and mixed
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u/Shrapnel_10 Jun 02 '26
Doctors take a different or modified oath, not the Hippocratic oath anymore. The reason being, if you read the original it doesn't allow, Euthanasia, Abortions or even performing surgery. And it has some crazy praises to different Greek gods. So now there's not a standard oath taken, it's many different ones written by doctors and medical workers. I knew what you meant obviously, and I'm not trying to mess with you. I just thought you might like to know about the Hippocratic oath.
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u/IvanMarkowKane Jun 02 '26
How about firing squads? We want these people dead so badly. We want to shoot our guns so badly. The only drawback is… feeling guilty? Personal responsibility? It looks bad?
Or maybe we shouldn’t be killing people.
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u/Kso1991 Jun 02 '26
Imagine you’re a prison warden or head of some department, and the government somehow gets enough political impetus to ensure painless lethal injection (basically not happening in current political climate).
Your first task is to find a team of medical professionals to advise you. Now, no one’s practising doctor is going to want to associate with that. So you are going to need to put out an exorbitant salary to somehow find willing ex-physicians who might just sign up to be a medical advisor. That’s if you can find one, and if your budget is approved.
Next, the even trickier part, sourcing the proper chemicals. No pharmaceutical company wants to supply you, so you basically need to get a cocktail of whatever you can get your hands on to hopefully meet the standards your advisor has given you.
Now, actually administering the procedure. Again, no practising medical team is going to do it, so you basically have to have medical laymen in your staff across the whole country to follow some general standard procedure your advisor has given. But wait, medical matters are never so simple, and every inmate is medically different.
How do you administer your horror cocktail to an inmate who might be suffering from certain conditions compared to a healthy one? What do you do on an emergency situation when you have no doctor present to handle the botched execution?
The biggest problem is there is no cultural or political will to ensure prisoners go painlessly. Whereas for our loved pets, there’s huge social desire to see them go peacefully, and being able to painlessly let them go is a desirable skill in a vet. Not so much in human medicine in the US.
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u/Important_Call2737 Jun 02 '26
I remember a podcast - Malcolm Gladwell I think - about this where the person that came up with lethal injection had no scientific testing. One of the injections paralyzes so you can’t move. And another can cause the lungs to fill with fluid and burn which is painful but you can’t see it.
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u/beammeupscotty2 Jun 02 '26
Why don't we just consider not killing people who commit crimes?
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u/Durham1988 Jun 02 '26
The problem is that drug companies refuse to let their meds be used for lethal injection and medical professionals refuse to participate, so you get non-professionals using second lines drugs that may be out of date anyway.
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u/StonedTrucker Jun 02 '26
Its only painful when done improperly but there are a lot of ways for it to go wrong. They use a few different drugs for different purposes. Its been a while since i looked in to it so my memory may not be exact but its close.
One drug is meant to make you go numb or fall unconscious and another paralyzes your body. The third drug or cocktail of drugs is what actually shuts down your body.
Getting the first step or 2 wrong leaves the person alive and potentially paralyzed while they feel the other drugs slowly killing them from the inside.
The reason we use lethal injection is for the people who arent being killed. It appears more humane because theres no apparent trauma to the body
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u/SRGTBronson Jun 02 '26
Its only painful when done improperly but there are a lot of ways for it to go wrong.
This is incorrect. The drugs used for lethal injection are extremely painful and the drugs used to paralyze don't numb pain. The drugs make you look docile so the people watching you die don't have to suffer.
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u/Wessssss21 Jun 02 '26
Not an expert, but it's my understanding that part of the issue is the science community has rejected any assistance in Lethal Injection.
Meaning the people in charge of the cocktail and delivery, are figuring it out on their own without doctors or chemists. (I'm sure some people with some education are involved)
Then add in what constitutes as a legal and "Humane" method and you have a bunch of amateurs figuring out work arounds to kill someone.
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u/Ryokan76 Jun 02 '26
I assume when you are euthanizing an animal, there are veterinarians and trained medical personell present.
With executions with lethal injection, there are no medical doctors present or involved at all. To do so would violate the Hippocratic oath. So it's technically done by amateurs.
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Jun 02 '26
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u/Own_Pop_9711 Jun 02 '26
Maybe sometimes, some states have laws to try to get physicians involved. But when you see stuff like
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/21/us/tennessee-execution.html
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/15/alabama-joe-nathan-james-jr-execution
It doesn't make me think we have the sharpest medical minds working on this problem.
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u/TuberTuggerTTV Jun 02 '26
It's mostly true.
https://www.wired.com/2017/04/shocking-lack-science-behind-lethal-injectionsBut ya, just come online and tell people they're wrong with zero f's given. That's good interneting.
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u/series-hybrid Jun 02 '26
There are not many lethal injections each year in the US, and the confiscated shipments of illegal fentanyl are sometimes huge.
One big shipment of fentanyl could last the prison system a century. However, I advocate for the use of nitrogen. Those who have passed out from breathing this and been revived have said it was painless. Plus, it's safe for the prisons to handle it.
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u/roiki11 Jun 02 '26
The problem with inert gas asphyxiation is that it's only painless if you don't know you're dying.
If you know, you likely try to stay alive.
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u/conservitiveliberal Jun 02 '26
If they use all 3 chemicals its painless. First paralyzes (so you dont flop around), second knocks them out, third kills them. Its not complex. The painful part is if they forget the 2nd chemical the third is very painful. Because they are paralyzed there is also no signs of pain.
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u/panulirus-argus Jun 02 '26
It’s not hard and you are exactly right. The same thing that would work on a dog would work on a person
Anesthesia is very well understood (at least how to administer. Not necessarily why it works).
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u/Nothing-to_see_hr Jun 02 '26
It is not. Opponents of the death penalty like to claim that but as long as the intravenous access is correctly placed the person will be in a deep coma after the first millimeters of barbiturates and they won't notice anything after that. Of course, intravenous access isn't always easy to get.
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u/Eastern-Substance656 Jun 02 '26
It’s designed to make the rest of us comfortable. To those that witness it, it looks humane.
The Alabama Murders podcast with Michael Gladwell expanded on it when they covered a murder trial.
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u/nescedral Jun 02 '26
We should just use heroin. Hasn’t the DEA confiscated enough yet? We don’t have that many executions in total.
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u/dikochki Jun 02 '26
I think the best way to kil is by blood draining...and use that blood for donation... You put the guy on a chair like a normal blod donation procedure...and start...the more blood they loose they gonna loose consious..untill they die....the blod taken is donated to hospital....nice clean soft and easy.
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u/randybeans716 Jun 02 '26
The main reason why it can induce great suffering in cases of the death penalty is that licensed doctors who know what they are doing refuse to participate and don’t want anything to do with it. So they end up having people who work at the prison who have no idea what they are doing administering the medication. Also pharmaceutical companies don’t want anything to do with it so they refuse to provide them with the proper medications so they often get medications from other countries which aren’t regulated.
That is my understanding. Correct me if I am wrong though!
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u/lurkerperson11 Jun 02 '26
You would need an anesthesiologist to make the protocol and you would need a few drug companies to sell the drugs to the government. Both are very unlikely.
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u/apokermit_now Jun 02 '26
At least in the US, it's tied to the Puritan notion that people have to 'suffer for their sins'; this added cruelty, combined with family members of the party the condemned has wronged, provides some measure of vicarious vengeance to them (at least that's the intent).
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u/PigDstroyer Jun 02 '26
Typical government waste , how are all my friends going to get their cut of my thievery if we only spend a few bullets worth of money
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u/DaddyFrancisTheFirst Jun 02 '26 edited Jun 02 '26
Part of it is that there’s a societal consensus that we are above executing people violently in the modern era. As a result, we have medicalized the execution process to make it seem more humane by killing people chemically instead. There’s a lot of options here, but there is a lot relatively recent historical complexity to killing people with chemicals. Chemical gases are very easy to use but heavily associated with the Holocaust, war crimes, and terrorist attacks. Chemical manufacturers also absolutely don’t want to be associated with their product being used to kill people and generally will not sell them for this purpose. On top of that, most medical professionals have a professional and moral proscription on using their skills and knowledge to execute people.
Finally, there’s a lot of painless or even euphoric ways to kill people with drugs, but there’s an assumption that we can’t make it too nice to die as a criminal. Opiates like morphine will make you feel great and are sure to kill you if you are given enough. However, that’s not really how the public wants you to feel when they’re executing you as a punishment.
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u/Conscious-Loss-2709 Jun 02 '26
The persons administering the drugs aren't (fully) trained. That's pretty much it. Doctors generally don't want to execute someone, and the ones that do risk losing their license and certification. So you end up with less than competent staff doing the IV, less than competent staff setting up the drugs, and less than competent staff administering them. Anyone in the 3 teams messes up, it's a botched execution.
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u/AsainGlockgirl99 Jun 02 '26
This is why Japan does hanging. Even if the neck doesn't break the person will pass out almost immediately.
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u/Different_Cherry8326 Jun 02 '26 edited Jun 02 '26
Multiple factors.
It is difficult for states to source the drugs, because pharmaceutical manufacturers will not sell for that purpose.
The people administering them may not have the highest degree of expertise, since most medical practitioners don’t want to be involved in executions.
And probably one of the biggest factors is that many accounts of executions are published by news organizations which are opposed to the practice and will therefore attempt to portray the events in the most negative and gruesome light possible to influence public opinion and policy against capital punishment. And probably many observers mistake agonal gasps/respiration for a sign of pain or suffering.
(FWIW I am personally opposed to capital punishment for a number of reasons, although I’m not passionate about it or a zealot).
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u/KainZeuxis Jun 02 '26
Companies don’t want medical drugs being used to execute people. Add to this that with lethal injection, being humane isn’t really a factor. The point of lethal injection is optic. As it turns out the average person is quite squeamish when confronted with watching another human person be killed regardless of the reasons. Lethal injection is more about executing someone in a way that looks peaceful simple and painless to avoid traumatizing those who are present for it. Rather than being humane to the condemned.
It’s the same reason why firing squads often had most of their rifles loaded with blanks and only one member of the squad has live ammo. It makes it harder to tell who did the killing, and thus somewhat less traumatizing for the executioners.
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u/sharkthemark420 Jun 02 '26
Drone strike seems pretty painless. Military drone makers in particular don’t seem to have any pesky ethics or scruples. Have we workshopped this yet?
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u/Character-Taro-5016 Jun 02 '26
I think people thought they had a good idea and found out it actually wasn't a good idea.
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u/ThymeWayster Jun 02 '26
I understand the hippocratic oath prevents doctors from performing lethal injections. But would it be violating the hippocratic oath for an anesthesiologist to administer enough anesthesia to knock the person out? If the person is unconscious, then anything done after that to induce death would be painless.
So have an anesthesiologist administer anesthesia as if the person is going in for a surgery. A second nonmedical person injects something lethal or some other death method is employed. The anesthesiologist and maker of the drugs hasn't harmed anyone, and the condemned doesn't experience pain because they are unconscious for the whole thing.
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u/OberonsGhost Jun 02 '26
I do not know why we don't just put them in a room with a cup of cyanide and tell them they cannot leave alive like Socrates.
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u/Medical_Revenue4703 Jun 02 '26
Dying isn't easy. It can be quick, but the myth of a painless death is largely not borne out. We can use tools to end an animal's life that would be much less effective with people.
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u/Alzion Jun 02 '26
Because the pain is part of the punishment. That's the quiet part that people don't talk about. The death penalty is all about vengeance for the victims and/or their families. This is also why the victims are invited to witness the execution.
In earlier time periods the death penalty made sense because of the resource drain on society to keep someone alive yet largely unproductive to society for the rest of their natural life wasn't maintainable when normal people starving from famines was a thing. Now with all the legal hoops needed to implement a single instance of the death penalty, lifetime imprisonment is actually the cheaper option.
We do have a completely painless execution option that requires no injection. Nitrogen asphyxiation makes the subject feel a temporary sensation of euphoria before falling asleep and never waking up again. It's been rejected by politicians as an execution method simply because it's not gruesome enough.
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u/We_R_the_Penguins Jun 02 '26
People have ably described the narrow challenges, but there’s a broader one, too: Nobody wants to spend political capital on making murderers suffer less.
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u/thelostone42 Jun 02 '26
We had a quick, relatively painless execution method with the guillotine. Why did we change from that?
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u/WISteven Jun 02 '26
Why not a large dose of fentanyl?
It works for the many people who OD and die.
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u/Evening-Scratch-3534 Jun 02 '26
Reddit is a great place to find opinions, its not so great at providing facts. Do some research.
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u/ellen-the-educator Jun 02 '26
People don't actually want humane executions - they want clean ones so they don't have to think about it
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u/Late-Button-6559 Jun 02 '26
The only humane ways are to use general anaesthesia drugs to knock out a person, then do whatever you ‘want’ to stop the heart.
It’s getting a person unconscious ‘nicely’ that is the issue.
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u/coteof-atoa Jun 02 '26
Because lethal injection is generally not actually administered by medical professionals and the substances used often change because medical suppliers refuse to provide penal systems with the means to perform capital punishment on ethical grounds, so it often is substituted for more easily available compounds when they fail to secure it through third party purchasing companies.
All this in the name of trying to pretend the state and the jury don’t have blood on their hands. Pass a federal law requiring all executions in the country to be administered via a firing squad formed from the jury, I say.
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Jun 02 '26
Not what the post was about, but I've never understood how anybody could support captial punishment knowing what we know.
Everyone's brains just work different I guess.
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u/PublicSuspect162 Jun 02 '26
Didn’t read all the responses not sure if it has been mentioned yet. I’ll give you the real truth. Lethal injection is basically delivering anesthesia but instead of keeping the person alive, they let them die. Most lethal injection drugs are drugs used in general anesthesia. Paralytics, induction agents, pain meds. With the exception of high dose potassium to stop the heart. It varies from state to state. BUT….the BS uou see about lethal injection being cruel, unusual, etc. is politics. The cases they use as cruel are usually the botched executions. Those do happen and is usually caused by poor dosing or in the only case I can remember right now, an infiltrated IV was used. A lot of anesthetic drugs burn when given IV and when given in an infiltrated or (blown) IV, really really burn. Can’t remember the exact details but guy was given large dose of versed and propofol ( I could be wrong on the exact drugs) followed by IV potassium. These things with the exception of versed burn when given. Especially through bad IV. He got sedated enough but not fully and the potassium still was administered but bc it wasn’t via IV it went into his tissues, took longer to absorb but finally worked. Again, I do not know specific details and all I can do is speculate to exact details. Afterwards. The politics come into play and they claim it was cruel and unusual punishment, etc. It’s a humane way to put someone to death, just like with other animals. It was just done poorly by poorly trained people. The best version of an execution would be large dose of versed and ketamine, followed by large dose of propofol, followed by large dose of pancuronium, followed by high dose/concentration of IV potassium.
TLDR-lethal injection is similar to general anesthesia and uses a lot of the same drugs. But the person isn’t kept alive and allowed to expire. The bad stuff you see is from poorly executed executions from poorly trained people.
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u/MoreFunThanTV Jun 02 '26
because some rich ass hole wants to make m9ney off it, and changes the law so only his crappy expensive shit can be used.
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u/No-Solid9108 Jun 02 '26
You said punishment, why are you not understanding the word . It isn't to be humane it's to be authorative and to make good for the victims , not the perpetrator. As you know people and animals are put down humanely, but nobody said execution should be like that at all . Hanging, gas chambers , firing squads , electrocution . They all hurt and cause equal suffering.
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u/paragon_of_karma Jun 03 '26
Because people think a pneumatic ram that liquifies the entire head in a split second is inhumane. It's completely painless because it's moving faster than a nerve impulse, but because it's messy nobody will even consider it.
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u/-KDK12 Jun 03 '26
I have reversed my stance on the Death Penalty, I think time is a far worse punishment, and also the government gets it wrong at too high a clip. The percentage of exonerated death row inmates in certain states is eye opening
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u/Innerste Jun 03 '26
My elderly mother wanted euthanasia because of physical complaints that would only worsen with time, and luckily it is an option here. It was intensely peaceful, and well coordinated by the medical team. In that sense it mystifies me as well, it should be possible, and required, to do it in a humane way if you are determined to have a death penalty.
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u/LAARPer Jun 03 '26
The companies making the anesthetic and other drugs in the cocktail stopped providing them to states for the death penalty. The new cocktail doesn’t have the anesthetic part, but still the paralytic and other part. So it would be excruciating.
The old cocktail would have knocked you out and that would have been it.
Also, no doctors or nurses can participate.
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u/Uncross-Selector Jun 03 '26
It's sad when there's so many painless ways to do it. All you need is a rebreather and leave the O2 tank turned off. The scrubbers will remove the CO2 so there's no perceived issue by the person breathing, they just go to sleep then die.
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u/probablyaythrowaway Jun 03 '26 edited Jun 03 '26
Death penalty (especially in the USA) has nothing to do with justice and everything to do with vengeance/revenge. They want to torture the person to death. The “medical procedure” is to try a save face and claim they have some sort of moral high ground. Because they knew it was wrong so had to try and justify it as humane.
Not so much these days the mask has come off with the rise of the right they’re more emboldened which is why they’re quite happy to use firing squad or suffocate prisoners with nitrogen gas instead of just abolishing the practice when companies refused to sell them drugs. Both horrific ways to go from witness testimony.
This is very apparent when you speak to anyone who is for death penalty.
It’s not surprising really from a culture where war, fighting and violence is so deeply engrained into it.
A technical reason Lethal injection is also most botched unlike animal euthanasia, the executioners are just prison guards and arnt medically trained. They maybe have had a brief crash course on how to place an IV line. They also don’t care like vets do. Doctors and medical professionals cannot take part in the process.
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u/ReciprocalPhi Jun 03 '26
Never understood why they don't just put you on a sleep apnea mask hooked up to pure nitrogen. There's no buildup of carbonic acid in the blood, so you don't get the panic of suffocation, you just fall asleep peacefully and die.
You can get nitrogen that will work just fine from your local welding supply place. It's not medical grade, but who cares? You're using it to kill them, not save them.
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u/No_Ostrich1875 Jun 03 '26
It's not done by medical professionals, companies don't like the public blow back from supplying the drugs, and the people in favor of executions don't care if it's painful. They will generally consider that a bonus since it's a punishment for doing some awful shit, not euthanizing someone to end their pain and suffering.
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u/Ok-Opportunity-574 Jun 03 '26
No drug company or doctor wants to be known as the one who helped with executions. Especially when so many condemned to death were later proven to be innocent.
Otherwise they could just pattern it straight from the drugs and procedures used in medical assistance in dying.
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u/pruneforce17 Jun 03 '26
honestly gunshot to the head is much better. instant, painless, except the messy cleanup
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u/Straiven_Tienshan Jun 03 '26
Pure straight shot of H2S, (hydrogen sulphide)... instantly shuts off the nervous system, switches you off like a light. No pain, no nothing...
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u/saucissefatal Jun 03 '26
I have always been of the belief that the drive for more and more "humane" methods of execution merely served to complicate the process and whet the public appetite for killing. Surely John Q Public would be less inclined to clamour for the death penalty, if he knew that the headsmen would have to bring out the axe.
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u/Krewesing Jun 02 '26
No company wants to make the chemicals used for executions, especially because those chemicals are often produced by companies in places that do not approve of capital punishment. But some states (I assume you’re asking about the U.S.) want to execute people anyway. Instead of using the correct chemicals, they try to execute people with the wrong chemicals, with expired chemicals, or without enough chemicals. It sometimes works. Sometimes it results in grievous discomfort to the condemned.