Executions, Doctors, The U.S. Supreme Court, And The Breath Of Kings

This report concluded that even though prison officials decided to inject the drugs into Lockett’s femoral vein (which is a more difficult and risky procedure), Lockett’s surface and deep veins had “excellent integrity.” Another execution that was scheduled to occur that same night has now been stayed for six months, pending an investigation into Mr. Lockett’s execution. On July 23, 2014, Arizona encountered a problem with the same drug in the execution of Joseph Wood, wherein the condemned inmate allegedly gasped for almost two hours before dying. The executions have prompted two important but different kinds of responses. In this post I write about the role of medical ethics and the U.S. Supreme Court’s response. Medical Ethics In an opinion from 1994, dissenting from the denial of certiorari in the death penalty case of Callins v. Collins, Justice Harry Blackmun famously wrote, “From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death,” and concluded that he was instead “obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed.” Two decades later, in May 2014, shortly after the botched Oklahoma execution, Bob Truog, Mark Rockoff, and I argued in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that physicians should take a similar position: that they should no longer tinker with the machinery of death and avoid participation in executions altogether. Our argument received significant discussion in the media, on ...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - Category: Health Management Authors: Tags: All Categories Health Law Policy Politics Public Opinion States Source Type: blogs