Death Penalty May Become Obsolete Soon

[UndercoverGator]

Very interesting. I never considered that trained medical personell might be the ones giving the lethal injections. At last, something useful that Dr. Kevorkian can do!

Doctors’ refusal might ring knell for death penalty

Published Monday, August 7, 2006

ST. LOUIS (AP) - The death penalty in the United States might be hitting a roadblock: the Hippocratic Oath.

Condemned inmates in three states have successfully challenged lethal injection as cruel and unusual. For the first time, judges have sided with inmates in ruling that lethal injection has the potential to be unconstitutionally cruel - that without doctors present, the procedure could be inhumane.

The problem is that few doctors are willing to do it. Ultimately, this could put a halt to the use of lethal injections.

In an oft-cited article in March in the New England Journal of Medicine, physician Atul Gawande, who said he favors the death penalty, summed up the belief of many in his profession.

"Medicine is being made an instrument of punishment," wrote Gawande, a general and endocrine surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. "We should seek a legal ban on the participation of physicians and nurses in executions.

"And if it turns out that executions cannot then be performed without, as the courts put it, ‘unconstitutional pain and cruelty,’ the death penalty should be abolished."

Regardless, judges in Missouri, California and North Carolina halted executions and required that physicians oversee the procedures. The first two states couldn’t find anesthesiologists willing to take part, according to a report in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

In North Carolina, a compromise was worked out. The state performed an execution after the court allowed a doctor to sit in another room and monitor the condemned using a machine.

Doctors are angry about being forced into the middle, saying the courts have trod on their time-honored ethical code. And they’re refusing to take part in executions.

"It’s extremely important that patients feel that physicians always do what’s in their best interest," said Jerry Kennett, president of the Missouri State Medical Association. His group’s position is that it is "totally wrong and unethical for physicians to be forced to participate in executions." The group will not specifically block any of its 6,000 members from participating, Kennett said, although it generally discourages them.

"Physicians always take their patients’ interest first," he said. "Certainly, execution would be outside those guidelines."

Tina Steinman, executive director of the Missouri Board of Healing Arts, which licenses physicians, said the board has no position on physician involvement.

Lethal injection is the primary execution method of 37 of the 38 states with the death penalty. Nebraska uses electrocution only. Seventeen of the 37 states require that a doctor participate. Missouri does not but has used a physician.

If federal courts continue to press for physician participation, and if doctors continue to agitate against it, more executions could be halted, said Richard Dieter, executive director of the not-for-profit Death Penalty Information Center.

"I think we’re at a dead end with this protocol," Dieter said. "If someone could come up with something a different kind of technology I think it would be welcomed."

Dieter said the disclosures in Missouri demonstrate problems with allowing a state to operate its executions with secret personnel and procedures. The procedure "needs to be in the sunlight," he said. "And that makes it less likely that doctors will participate."

http://www.columbiatribune.com/2006/...807News014.asp

[pacific breeze]

There are many, many instances of lethal injections going horribly wrong because prison personnel don't know what they're doing. Likewise for the electric chair. These are the sorts of stories prisons don't like to tell, especially the privately run ones.

[Grimmlok]

ahahahahahah the religious fucktards can bitch and moan when they have to dispense birth control... shoe's on the other foot NOW, death-penalty lovin' republicans!

[strikeapose]

If I were a doctor they couldn't drag me in to observe or participate in an execution. The whole notion of death penalty is hypocritical. You can't kill, but we can. Killing is wrong unless we administer it. Riiiight.

[buttmunch]

I wait for the day when the US catches up with much of the rest of the civilized world in realizing that the death penalty is barbaric and useless. I fear that I wait in vain.

[Grimmlok]

I'm not against the death penalty in some cases. I mean come on.. Hitler? murdering pedophiles?

[buttmunch]

Nah...can't buy it. I'd rather see them live and suffer for a long, long time.

[Grimmlok]

Why waste money, resources, space and time. They aren't able to function in society. Just kill them and be done with.

[buttmunch]

Well, we've been through this before but basically, it costs shitloads of money to put someone to death and at the end of the day, there is always the kernal of doubt. Remember the guy in Maine that was recently killed by a vigilante? He was registered as a child sex abuser because, at the age of 18 or 19 (can't remember which) he had sex with his 16 year-old underage girlfriend and her parents pressed statutory rape charges. Not to say this is always the case because it's obviously not, but there are just too many cases of innocent people being convicted of crimes they didn't commit, so I'll take my chances on a paying for a few truly heinous people living long lives behind bars before I'll support anything that could put an innocent person to death. It can't be taken back once they're dead.

[Grimmlok]

Well the cases I mentioned are generally the most extreme, plus with today's forensic advances (DNA profiling and what have you) it's pretty frickn hard to get a false conviction

[pacific breeze]

Well, it still happens all the time Grimm. Just because the resources are available doesn't mean they are always used, especially on the poor who make up the largest number of prisoners.

[Grimmlok]

Hitler wasn't poor

[crumpet]

Well, I guess it's back to the old firing squad........

[buttmunch]

Gary Gilmour would be proud.