When lethal injection began replacing the electric chair and the gas chamber as the preferred method of state-sponsored murder in the United States, its advocates argued that it was a humane way of killing.
But lethal injection was adopted by the states without conducing any medical or scientific studies to ensure that death would be painless. Now, a growing number of doctors say that lethal injection merely hides the pain that the condemned feel by immobilizing them.
From the Los Angeles Times:
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.
. . .
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.
This is not surprising, as the US has a sordid history of inflicting as much pain as possible during executions. Say what you will about the guillotine, but it is more humane than any form of capital punishment practiced in the US. At least death is almost instantaneous.
Some people may wonder why it matters if lethal injection is an extremely painful procedure. After all, capital punishment is supposed to punish, right?
According to the majority opinion in Gregg v. Georgia, the 1976 Supreme Court decision that made capital punishment legal again:
When a form of punishment in the abstract (in this case, whether capital punishment may ever be imposed as a sanction for murder) rather than in the particular (the propriety of death as a penalty to be applied to a specific defendant for a specific crime) is under consideration, the inquiry into "excessiveness" has two aspects. First, the punishment must not involve the unnecessary and wanton infliction of pain. Furman v. Georgia, supra, at 392-393 (BURGER, C. J., dissenting). See Wilkerson v. Utah, 99 U.S., at 136 ; Weems v. United States, supra, at 381.
The Supreme Court found that "the unnecessary and wanton infliction of pain" violates the 8th Amendment's protection against cruel and unusual punishment. If allegations by doctors and Human Rights Watch are true, then this makes lethal injection unconstitutional.
I don't believe that death by lethal injection was ever about being humane to the condemned. The goal is to sanitize capital punishment, to make it look like a medical procedure. If the US brought back the gallows or the firing squad, perhaps a majority of Americans would recognize the barbarity of state-sponsored murder.