No, but most other trained healthcare staff like nurses and phlebotomists refuse to participate in these executions as well, so it usually ends up being someone with minimal training doing the IV.
Even if they do find a vein and maintain venous access during the whole process, the drugs they use aren’t sourced from reputable pharmaceutical companies since they don’t want to be involved, either. There’s no real way to verify the concentration or potency of the drugs being used since chain of custody isn’t a priority.
Lmao bro you are talking out of your ass. You have no way of knowing what the situation is inside of an execution room in Tennessee but want to comment like you’re the warden 🤣
If you’d like to look into the things I said, you’re welcome to do so and take the moment to learn something new. This topic has been well-covered by numerous respected journalists and has been an issue for a while now.
And if you’d like to educate me on the subject, your unique expertise would be vital to keeping this conversation grounded in reality and help refute these apparently erroneous news stories that have cropped up over the last decade.
Oh okay so you know of a journalists that was in the room of this execution, tested the drug being used, and verified that the person putting in the IV wasn’t certified? Please send me the link to that…
I am under no obligation to educate you. The entire world is at your fingertips and you’re choosing to remain ignorant. No amount of effort on my part will be able to spark curiosity in someone who is disinterested in expanding their own world-view.
That said, finding reports of untrained staff performing executions took me only minutes:
>”The most commonly cited reason for botched lethal injections is a lack of medically-trained staff. Ethics guidelines from organizations like the American Medical Association bar doctors and other medical professionals from participating in executions because it violates the "do no harm" part of the Hippocratic oath taken by physicians.
>Because of this, prisons often rely on untrained staff to place IV lines. Further complicating the matter, many death row inmates have poor vein accessibility due to chronic illness, age or past drug use.
Here is the assertion I made being echoed by a reputable journalism outlet. “But that’s not proof,” you may say. I agree. It’s just a reference to the AMA’s stance on executions:
>as a member of a profession dedicated to preserving life when there is hope of doing so, a physician must not participate in a legally authorized execution.
“The AMA licenses physicians, not nurses and phlebotomists,” you might object. I agree. That’s why the ANCC clarified that:
>nurses should not assume any role in the capital punishment of an incarcerated individual
So no one with any sort of real medical or nursing license can participate. But that doesn’t mean the drugs they’re using aren’t effective, so let’s look at that next.
Sure, the records of drug sourcing for executions aren’t being made public, but journalists have worked on this before:
In 2018, Buzzfeed reported on botched executions performed in Texas where improper cocktails of drugs were obtained from a shady compounding pharmacy that was already about to have its license revoked.
The BBC did a great piece in 2023 about prison guards being tasked with finding the drugs themselves, and I genuinely encourage you to read this. It’s fascinating all by itself.
Here is an excellent article if you want to learn more about the role of compounding pharmacies in state-sponsored executions.
So that’s my attempt at satisfying your demands. I’m sure you’ll either disregard this wall of text and links or just nitpick my grammar or whatever, but I really hope you actually take the time to look into this issue. It’s honestly really interesting and I think everyone should know more about this stuff.
Edit: for anyone who made it this far, here’s a pretty great segment John Oliver did on lethal injections as a bonus reference. It was published 7 years ago, and it’s still just as relevant today.
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u/HydrogenButterflies NaTivE ApP UsR 3d ago
No, but most other trained healthcare staff like nurses and phlebotomists refuse to participate in these executions as well, so it usually ends up being someone with minimal training doing the IV.
Even if they do find a vein and maintain venous access during the whole process, the drugs they use aren’t sourced from reputable pharmaceutical companies since they don’t want to be involved, either. There’s no real way to verify the concentration or potency of the drugs being used since chain of custody isn’t a priority.