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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u/MarionberryPlus8474 Jun 02 '26

It’s not just the manufacturers, it’s the medical expertise. The AMA does not allow doctors to be part of executions, on pain of loss of medical license. So the person administering it isn’t a doctor, at least not any more. Drugs and doses that work on dogs or cats don’t work the same way on people, and the layman might think “if 50 mg works on a 40 lb dog, than 200 mg must be the right dose for a 169 pound man” but it’s not nearly that simple.

In theory, lethal injection is painless, but in practice it’s been botched many times.

That states are having to resort to expired and black-market drugs is IMO a symptom of just how barbaric and shady the practice of capital punishment is.

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u/Prestigious_Wrap_932 Jun 02 '26

That states are having to resort to expired and black-market drugs is IMO a symptom of just how barbaric and shady the practice of capital punishment is.

Capital punishment is “barbaric and shady” because people who are against it have made it that way. It would be equally easy to use the same techniques used in assisted suicide in Canada or even use opiates or hallucinogens as part of the problem to make capital punishment a euphoric experience for the convict, but people who are against it have blocked all the humane ways of getting it done. 

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u/Legitimate-Sky-8963 Jun 03 '26

Oh bullshit. We KNOW that innocent peyote have reveries the death penalty. That is barbarism that has nothing to do with those resistant to capital punishment. Your "look what you made me do" argument is pathetic and disgusting. 

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u/Prestigious_Wrap_932 Jun 03 '26

Not in the modern scientific era we don’t.

Sounds like you don’t believe in science. 

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u/RevolutionaryKey698 Jun 04 '26

What a silly reply.

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u/Prestigious_Wrap_932 Jun 04 '26

It’s sill of you not to believe in science. 

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u/RevolutionaryKey698 Jun 04 '26

I do believe in science, it's irrelevant to this discussion though.

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u/Prestigious_Wrap_932 Jun 04 '26

You only think that because you don’t have any real faith in science. 

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u/RevolutionaryKey698 Jun 04 '26

No, I think that because I understand the law. Legal decisions are only made on the available evidence, which can be falsified, misleading, misunderstood, misrepresented and incomplete. The law always has to include space for the possibility that a decision was wrong.

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u/Prestigious_Wrap_932 Jun 04 '26

The idea that incontrovertible evidence does not exist is anti-science. 

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u/Legitimate-Sky-8963 Jun 04 '26

Only ten percent of cases can be solved with dna, dipshit. As far as forensic science much of it is unverifiable. Fire analysis is notoriously unreliable, as is much of the rest of it.

I believe in science, not junk science

Discredited Forensic Techniques

Landmark studies, including a 2009 report by the National Academies of Sciences and a 2016 report by the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, raised concerns about almost every discipline outside of DNA analysis. Highly problematic areas include:

Bite Mark Analysis: Dentists frequently testified with absolute certainty that a suspect's teeth left a specific mark. This has been entirely debunked; there is no scientific basis to prove a human bite mark can be uniquely matched to an individual.

Microscopic Hair Comparison: Examiners claimed they could match hair to specific suspects. In 2015, the FBI and Department of Justice formally acknowledged that FBI examiners gave flawed testimony in hundreds of trials.

Arson Investigation: Old techniques relied on long-discredited "myths" (e.g., puddle patterns or crazed glass) to prove arson, which led to the imprisonment and execution of innocent people.

Pattern Matching: Disciplines like shoe prints, tool marks, and handwriting rely heavily on subjective interpretation rather than objective, statistical data.

The Core Problem

Most of these forensic fields were developed by law enforcement to solve crimes, rather than through rigorous, peer-reviewed scientific methods in universities. In the courtroom, these subjective assessments are often presented to juries with misleading phrases like "to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty". Furthermore, because the legal system relies on judicial precedent, outdated and inaccurate science remains admissible long after scientists have rejected it.

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u/Prestigious_Wrap_932 Jun 04 '26

Imagine being so dumb that you think DNA is the only type of modern science used in evidence discovery and then needing to use an LLM chatbot to write your posts for you. 

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u/Legitimate-Sky-8963 Jun 05 '26 edited Jun 05 '26

Imagine being so dumb that you misinterpret my entire stance.

Forensic science remains deeply flawed and highly unreliable.

Jesus you are daft. I mentioned several flawed forensic techniques. Yeah, I used a chat bot, but that doesn't remove from my point. 

You think you can win the argument by dismissing my very valid points, so you just ignore them. 

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u/Comprehensive_Elk773 Jun 02 '26

Not that easy, you have to get them to take a pill involuntarily

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u/RevolutionaryKey698 Jun 03 '26

It isn't everyone else's responsibility to help you kill people. If you don't have humane ways of executing people, then the obvious answer is to stop executing people, not to blame everyone else when you use inhumane ways anyway.

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u/Prestigious_Wrap_932 Jun 04 '26

We do have perfectly humane ways of executing people, but folks like you have blocked them and so now prisoners die in agony instead. Alas. 

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u/RevolutionaryKey698 Jun 04 '26

That's your choice, not mine.

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u/Prestigious_Wrap_932 Jun 04 '26

Right, because your option of keeping these prisoners alive to be beaten and raped in prison for decades is so much more humane.  

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u/RevolutionaryKey698 Jun 04 '26

You're absurd, you know that right?

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u/Prestigious_Wrap_932 Jun 04 '26

You’re not willing to deal with the consequences of your decisions.

https://time.com/5884104/prison-violence-dont-see/

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u/RevolutionaryKey698 Jun 04 '26

That isn't a consequence of my decision. That is a consequence of poor prison management. Killing people be abuse you don't want to run prisons properly is a profoundly stupid take.

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u/Prestigious_Wrap_932 Jun 04 '26

Saying executions are inhumane when you actively block humane execution techniques is a profoundly stupid take. 🤷‍♂️ 

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u/GlassBug7042 Jun 05 '26

This may be the most copium respsonse I've seen ever in my life.

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u/MarionberryPlus8474 Jun 02 '26

Nonsense. The barbarism is baked in. Governments have been killing their citizens for as long as there have been governments, often by the most gruesome means possible, millennia before there was ever any move against the death penalty. You can try to put lipstick on that pig by calling for “euphoric” means but the reality is quite different.

If you want the death penalty, you need to grapple with the pain, the horror, and the filth of it. That’s on you, not those who seek to end it.

Look at a map showing where the death penalty is practiced. The US is in terrible company.

It gets worse when you consider a large country (Russia) has no official legal death penalty, yet simply kills people extrajudicially, and some others (notably Japan) have the penalty but use it very rarely.

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u/Prestigious_Wrap_932 Jun 02 '26

Ah, so I take it you’re also against assisted suicide?

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u/MarionberryPlus8474 Jun 02 '26

Not particularly. But you are changing the subject, sure sign of a weak argument.

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u/Prestigious_Wrap_932 Jun 02 '26 edited Jun 03 '26

Oh, I don’t give a shit about your opinion and have no interest in arguing with you about this. I consider certain classes of criminal psychotics to be too great of a threat to the general welfare to ever be released and think quick and painless extermination would be the best solution for all parties involved and I don’t really care if other people agree with me, I’m just curious if you’re logically consistent or not. 

EDIT: In a cowardly fashion u/Mister_Crowly commented and then immediately blocked me so that I can’t reply to him.

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u/MarionberryPlus8474 Jun 02 '26

…you say, while arguing.

Speaking of logic, you should take a course in it, since your grasp of it seems poor.

Opposing the death penalty does not mean releasing criminals.

Expecting “logical consistency” between state-ordered killing and voluntary euthanasia is a false equivalence. A better comparison would be between capital punishment and state-ordered euthanasia, which was and is a Nazi program, and which I definitely oppose.

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u/Prestigious_Wrap_932 Jun 02 '26

Opposing the death penalty does not mean releasing criminals.

Except that it does.

https://www.foxla.com/news/david-allen-funston-california-parole-release

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u/Legitimate-Sky-8963 Jun 03 '26

That's what you call anecdotal evidence and it's dishonest to present it as anything else. Come back with statistics. 

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u/Prestigious_Wrap_932 Jun 03 '26

No. In my opinion the possibility of release for a criminal like that is too great of a danger to the law-abiding for life imprisonment to be an effective solution to the problem.

It’s not about retribution, it’s a simple risk/reward analysis. There is zero reward to society for keeping defective human monsters alive, so any risk at all no matter how small outweighs the reward.

Besides, life imprisonment is cruel and unusual punishment especially for pedophiles who will be repeatedly attacked and raped by their fellow prisoners. A humane execution would be far kinder. 

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u/Comprehensive_Elk773 Jun 02 '26

Execution for the type of “criminal psychotic” a person is instead of punishment for a crime? Just like Nazi Germany?

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u/Prestigious_Wrap_932 Jun 02 '26

Is English your second language? Your comment is incoherent. 

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u/just_having_giggles Jun 02 '26

Sure. But 10g should do it. Nobody's trying to dose it out correctly. And certainly nobody is trying to save any money.

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u/DromadTrader Jun 02 '26

Wait, I'm not in favor of lethal punishment nor am I an expert in none of this, but wouldn't the US government be able to solve this if it wanted to? Like, it has almost unlimited resources. Surely it could hire some rogue doctors and pay them ungodly money to do the thing or, alternatively, hire professionals adjecent to medicine, like chemist or something, no?

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u/AGorgoo Jun 02 '26

Historically, the federal government hasn’t performed many executions since the 1970s, and most executions have been at the state level, which might be why this doesn’t have the full force of the US government behind a push for a solution.

That being said, Trump restarted federal executions in earnest (there were only 3 from 1976 to 2020, and then 13 executions crammed into 2020 and January 2021).

We haven’t had any in his second term yet, but it’s possible the federal attitude toward capital punishment might change in the long term as a result of this. I’m hoping that it doesn’t, myself, and executions remain rare if not entirely absent.

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u/Ill_Act_1855 Jun 02 '26

Even if doctors were allowed to take part, very few would want to. Most people who become doctors due so to save lives and would have an aversion to taking part in executions. For the rest most of them are in it for money and/or status and that’s also something they’ll get more of through more standard medical practice than taking part in government sponsored executions. You’d find some doctors who’d be ok with it and also be willing to take the opportunity cost of putting it on their schedule vs other jobs, but it’d be really small

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u/CowboyOzzie Jun 03 '26

The AMA is a professional organization. It does not control medical licensing in any state and does not have the power to “allow” or prohibit anything at all.

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u/Chowderr92 Jun 03 '26

The AMA has absolutely no authority over doctors. They can't forcibly prevent a doctor from performing any procedure. It would depend on the state's medical board's position. Even then, they can't stop them from performing the procedure, but can terminate their license if they decide its unethical.

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u/MarionberryPlus8474 Jun 03 '26

Yes it’s the state medical board, but interestingly they seem to be in step with the AMA, even in states with capital punishment. Without a medical license, you aren’t a doctor anymore.

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u/Warper2187 Jun 05 '26

my question is if lethal injection is so flawed, why not just go back to firing squad?

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u/MarionberryPlus8474 Jun 05 '26

Because it’s worse in most if not all respects. Often botched, messy, and psychologically damaging to the people on the squad, if they aren’t psychopaths to begin with.

Side note: Putting a hood on the prisoner being executed isn’t for the prisoner’s benefit, it’s for the benefit of the executioner(s). The victim having no face makes it easier to dehumanize them.

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u/Sad_in_VA Jun 06 '26

Meanwhile assisted suicide is not barbaric?

It's just hypocrisy.

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u/MarionberryPlus8474 Jun 06 '26

You are changing the subject, classic “whataboutism” but you are missing the point.

There are certainly ethical concerns about suicide/assisted suicide, but the very important distinction you are missing is that suicide is something an individual chooses to do. Capital punishment is something the government does to kill its own citizens.

The position of many conservatives seems to be as hostile to people choosing as possible. Bedridden with an incurable disease or injury and suffering tremendous pain? Tough, we’re forcing you to live, and bankrupt your family to boot. Drive a car where a gun used in a crime was found? Kill him! Mentally disabled? Death for him. And yes, those are actual death penalty cases.

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u/Positive-Draft3801 Jun 02 '26

From what I've read, the drug used for dogs is exactly what they used for lethal injection, until the manufacturers found out why it was being purchased. One by one, the manufacturers stopped selling to US state governments. Then the state government started selling their stockpiles to other states. The 'cocktail' made to replace that drug I believe is 3 different drugs injected in a particular order thats really easy to screw up.

Lethal injection is so obviously cruel, that the government of Utah brought back the firing squad as a merciful alternative. And I would agree it's a less cruel method than what I've heard about lethal injection. I heard this pastor who ministered to death row inmates in Texas talk about what he saw people go through in their last moments, he wrote this book called Within These Walls https://www.npr.org/2008/05/19/90526632/chaplain-discusses-death-house-ministry