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Controversial Execution In Ohio Uses New Lethal Drug Combination
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "CNN reports that Ohio inmate Dennis McGuire appeared to gasp and convulse for roughly 10 minutes before he finally died during his execution by lethal injection using a new combination of drugs. The new drugs were used because European-based manufacturers banned U.S. prisons from using their drugs in executions — among them, Danish-based Lundbeck, which manufactures pentobarbital. The state used a combination of the drugs midazolam, a sedative, and the painkiller hydromorphone, the state corrections department told CNN. In an opinion piece written for CNN earlier this week, a law professor noted that McGuire's attorneys argued he would 'suffocate to death in agony and terror.' 'The state disagrees. But the truth is that no one knows exactly how McGuire will die, how long it will take or what he will experience in the process,' wrote Elisabeth A. Semel, clinic professor of law and director of the Death Penalty Clinic at U.C. Berkeley School of Law. According to a pool report from journalists who witnessed the execution, the whole process took more than 15 minutes, during which McGuire made 'several loud snorting or snoring sounds.' Allen Bohnert, a public defender who lead McGuire's appeal to stop his execution in federal court on the grounds that the drugs would cause undue agony and terror, called the execution process a 'failed experiment' and said his office will look into what happened. 'The people of the state of Ohio should be appalled by what took place here today in their name.'"
I don't know what is then.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
And her opinion on the 8th amendment matters why exactly? (yes, yes, I know that invoking the victim, and her precious fetus too, I see, is fashionable; but it's kind of a lousy substitute for thinking).
So ignoring for a minute all the ethical questions etc, just thinking about the process. I do not have medical training, but I have always wondered why they can't just use the drugs used for general anesthetic in general surgeries? Put someone under with those, then you can stop their heart painlessly when they're unconscious. Certainly there is a large supply of those drugs around.
Hasn't this been a solved problem for a hundred years or so?
I forgot how important it is to get a second wrong to match with the first one. It's like Go Fish, if you get related pairs, they both go away, right?
'several loud snorting or snoring sounds' doesn't really sound like "cruel and unusual," sorry.
Compared to what he did, I'm not terribly sorry for him. A few minutes of "snorting or snoring" (during most of which he was probably not fully conscious) doesn't seem like a big deal.
There's a reason that independent third parties adjudicate trials and not friends and family of the victim and accused.
I guess I should be appalled, but.. the dude slaughtered a pregnant girl; I don't care how he died exactly at all. In fact, I'm going to consider this a successful QA test and move on.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
If we want the death penalty to be a deterrent against crime, potential criminals should have to face a death that's scary, and not expect a painless injection that lets them quietly pass away.
Though I question the value of any death penalty as a deterrent since it's so rarely applied and the criminal either thinks he's going to get away with it or isn't worried about the consequences no matter what the consequences are -- 5 years in prison and then death might be even more attractive to some than a lifetime in prison.
How hard can it be to do this? Start with standard general anesthesia. One the person is out, then administer cyanide or whatever.
Or use the same thing we use for animals.
Or look at how they do assisted suicide. There are plenty of solutions there.
We have complete understanding of how to knock someone so far out that you can cut into them for hours in an operating room, even to the point of removing their heart for a transplant. Why the heck to people have to go from fully conscious to dead in a single shot? Knock them out completely painlessly, and then kill them while they can feel nothing. I've never understood lethal injections at all!
I thought testing drugs on humans -- without their informed consent and successful prior testing -- was banned long ago.
It doesn't matter that the person is a prisoner; in fact the standards are higher for them, because they are much less able to refuse consent. It also doesn't matter that they will die soon; terminally ill patients also must give informed consent.
What kind of sick society experiments on helpless prisoners?
Since innocent people end up on death-row and are frequently exonnerated by DNA or new evidence, then how can it be logical to maintain a death penalty? If you're going to say "well, maybe .1% of the time an innocent person is put to death but it's for the greater good", then how about you line up to be the next .1%?
Screw morphine. I've wondered why we don't just use nitrogen to suffocate them. There is no suffocation reflex, because the body's suffocation reflex is based on overabundance of CO2, not underabundance of O2. It's completely painless - they pass out within a minute and never wake up. In the oil and shipping industries we have "Nitrogen: The Silent Killer" posters plastered everywhere in enclosed at-risk spaces. I never understood why we deal with expensive drug cocktails when we have tanks of simple N2 ready to be used.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
You are not allowed to kill, but it okay for us to kill you.
I won't get into the fiscal debate as to whether it is cheaper to lock away someone for life or to execute with multiple appeals and proceedings. It shouldn't matter. If it is wrong to take a life, then it is wrong to take it in any circumstance. End of story. Then when you factor in the fact that we are constantly finding innocent people convicted (if not for death penalty offenses). Often due to poor representation, over zealous prosecutors, or shoddy politically or financially motivated police and forensic work, it would seem to me that the ethical cost of killing one innocent person would outweigh all of it. Even if our judicial system was perfect, humans make errors.
However, as with so much else in our society, our desire for vicarious retribution, our poor ability to truly judge relative risk, and the fear peddled by those in power to keep you caged keep winning.
Silence is a state of mime.
Oh yes, it's much better to put the vicious murderer in prison for 60 years or so, at $75,000+ a year.
Considering the whole appeals process ends up costing more than life in prison, yes, that would be better.
Exactly this. I'm only a second year med student and even I could tell you that trying to kill someone with the mixture of drugs in the summary would be a really ugly process. I'm pretty sure we can't use propofol for the same reason we can't use the pentobarbital mentioned in the summary, but honestly a regular dose of propofol to knock someone unconscious plus a pneumatic piston like we use to humanely kill food animals would be the obvious option. Sure it makes a bigger mess, but it's WAY more humane for the person being executed, the one who were trying to protect from unnecessary cruelty and suffering. Propofol plus guillotine works well too. As it turns out medical science knows a lot more about reliably making people unconscious with drugs than about reliably killing them with drugs. Given that, if the killing is to happen, it should be done with something we know works reliably and quickly.
later adjusted to 25 after the observers called bullshit...
*personally* I'm against the death penalty, but if you're going to do it, just make yourself a Guillotine. "Lethal injection" is quite distasteful as it dresses up a killing as some pseudo-medical procedure. Scewing this up quite so magnificently is just jaw-dropping - although I suspect you don't send your brightest off to work in the penal system.
What really shocks me though is the response of a significant number of people here, that the suffering he endured was justified as it was 'deserved'. I've tried in vain to think of how to get my point across, but can't think of any common ground to even start my pitch that the deliberate infliction of suffering upon another is simply wrong.
I'm a great big atheist - but generally feel I've got a lot in common with those of faith, at least in my views if not the underlying reason. My biblical knowledge is rusty to say the least, but I'm reasonably sure when Jesus killed sinners, he at least did it mercifully.
...Like another wrong!
Go for it, America, show us how it's done. You lead the world.
Stick Men
People can have really bad reactions to opiates: they can aspirate into their lungs; they can be allergic; if the subject has an opiate tolerance, they could remain conscious while they die of respiratory paralysis.
The idea with the three drug protocol is that the administrator can be reasonably certain the subject is unconscious and insensate when they give the drugs that stop breathing, and the drugs are selected for their uniform effect. Opiates do all kinds of stuff and the death can be either peaceful or horrible depending on individual response.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
I, for one, do not believe the state has a right to take any life, regardless. Besides, if our society wasn't hell-bent on spending billions of dollars to incarcerate non-violent offenders, there would be plenty of cash in the coffers to put every sociopath away for several lifetimes, with money left over.
That's really all I have to say about this.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Remember, we already spent more money dealing with the mandatory appeals required for death penalty cases than it would cost to imprison him for life (which doesn't have the same mandatory appeals process). Had we just sent him to prison for life without parole, it would have been cheaper. The death penalty is not a cost saving measure.
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Ignoring the fact that the appeals process for the death penalty costs far more than lifetime imprisonment, your figures are wildly inaccurate. The U.S. average cost per prisoner, per year, is in the $20-30K range, not even close to $75K.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
Yes yes, all very well but doesn't using the term "precious fetus" sarcastically make you a fucking cunt?
You're not far off the mark. For short OR procedures, fentanyl is preferred because the onset is faster and the duration is shorter, but hydromorphone can be used. Midazolam is used in conjunction for it's sedative and amnetic properties. This is also still a common combination when patients are mechanically vented. Patients lose complete orientation to what's happening to them before they lose consciousness. The observers' perception that he "suffered" is very unlikely to be the case.
Yes, but the standard is "cruel and unusual" not "cruel or unusual". If a death method is cruel but common, that's fine. If the method is not cruel, but novel, that's also fine. The whole point is to stop executioners from thinking up new ways to torture people to death.
So, kill them more frequently at centralized locations, and speed the appeal process.
I'm not for debating the right and wrong of situations -- that's for women. I'm a man. I like to fix things.
In these discussions of the value of a human life, I'm not alone in not simply defining "human" as having the required number of chromosomes.
The thing Ohio had in its custody was an animal, and was put down as such.
It ain't just about the victim's family, asshole - it's so that he can never do the same crime again, and we don't have to bear the cost of his remaining days.
Bullshit. LWOP is cheaper than capital punishment. Fact.
It's got nothing to do with public safety and fuck all to with economics. It's about retribution, satisfying the bloodlust of an angry mob. Capital punishment is lynch-mob justice. It's expensive, ineffective, and barbaric. Period.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
I posted this above, but...
A colorant or odorant could be easily added for operant safety, but it's not any more dangerous for the operator than, say, dental gasses.
And you're an animal for saying so, and should also die.
See how easy that is?
If we can me completely certain that there never will be an error in a capitol crime sentencing, I would advocate immediately dropping the killer in a wood chipper head first. However, being as there is always going to be some error in the legal system the question we should be asking is, "How many innocent people are we willing to murder in the name of revenge/justice?"
Because, until you get to that 100%, and never make an error, that is what you are doing. You are murdering people because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, are the wrong skin color, or cannot afford a good lawyer. At least if you screw up a life in prison sentence, you can let the person out in a decade or two when the truth comes to light.
There is a great bullshit test I came up with to give to someone who advocates capitol punishment. Ask them if our court system is 100% perfect in convicting the guilty. Then ask them if that means that means that we are murdering at least a few of the wrong people with capitol punishment. Then ask them if they would still feel that capitol punishment was fair and just if they were one of those people that was selected to die. Then ask them if they still support capitol punishment. If they say still yes, they are lying.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
You're missing the point.
We need and have the drugs we use in surgery. But if we use them for executions, the european companies that make these drugs we depend on for surgery will take them away. That's the whole point of this.
We're not out of pentobarbital. We have an unlimited supply (at market price) for surgery.
Here in Denmark, Lundbeck has been under fire for their drug being used to kill people. They've tried to defend themselves in various ways, e.g. by casting it as misuse as their drug. But in the end in Denmark the American executions are viewed upon in the same light as the stories you hear of amputations and stoning people to death in the middle east. So the reaction has been as if a company sold convenient stones to be used for said stonings.
It is sad to see that the outcome is more suffering.
Maybe because living in constant fear of imminent death (not just potential execution at a set date, but literally ANY MINUTE NOW!) counts as cruel and psychological torture?
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
we are all humans and we know what justice is. If a person did something horrible, then yes it's justice to do it back to them.
So how does your definition of justice differ from your definition of revenge?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I'll bet you drive a big truck too.
A Nissan Leaf.
I'm a full of delicious contradictions.
My concern in this particular line of thought isn't about the right or wrong of the situation. Once we decide to execute people, and we know it's expensive, and we do them infrequently and all over the damned place, then we should employ some sort of economy of scale in doing so.
Okay then. How about industrial-scale gas chambers with a railway line going in the front and a crematorium out the back? To ease the minds of the convicts you could just lie to them and tell them it's a work camp, and put a sign on the gate saying "work sets you free." Better build that chimney pretty high though. The locals are sure to complain about the smell of burning human flesh.
Seriously though, do you people ever listen to yourselves?
Drill baby drill - on Mars
I'm in an odd position of believing in the death penalty, but willing to see it go.
I believe that if we took the death penalty seriously as a society, and actually used it, it would stop being an empty threat. As it stands, there are so few executions in most of the states that we are getting very, very little deterrence out of it. Criminals know that it doesn't happen often. If they are convicted, they don't believe they'll be given the death penalty. Their chances are statistically 0.
Further, I don't believe vengeance is a sufficient motive for the death penalty, or indeed any state punishment. If it doesn't prevent further crime in some way, the state has no business there. Incarceration physically prevents further crime... while giving prisoners a reason not to come back*... and theoretically rehabilitating them**. Possible escape and the ordering of crimes from within prison are the only other two reasons I can see for a death penalty, but these seem rather weak. High risk criminals should be in maximum security already.
*(Prison should be unpleasant. It shouldn't be as awful and dangerous as it typically is, but it shouldn't be pleasant.) **(We should offer rehabilitation, not that we do.)
The Paradox:
It is commonly said that it costs more to execute a man than to keep him incarcerated for the rest of his natural life. I don't know if this is true or not, but it does highlight unfairness in the system.
Imagine two murderers in a death penalty state. The first is convicted with special circumstances, and is sentenced to die. The prosecutor can prove the guilt of the second prisoner, but can't quite prove special circumstances. He is convicted for life. The first is given appeal after appeal. The second can ask for an appeal, but may be denied.
Note that the state has taken the lives of both of these people. The second one is just killed slower. Either, we give death penalty cases too many appeals, or we don't give life sentence cases enough. Something is out of balance here.
(Addendum: Why don't we let death row prisoners choose? There are some interesting theories out there about humane execution. So long as the method chosen results in death, is acceptably inexpensive, can be accomplished from within the prison, and is not dangerous to others, it would be the most ethical way to kill someone. Not that it is ethical, that is still open for debate... but it would be the most ethical.)
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Considering that she was presumably still pregnant by choice, it evidently had some value to her, and isn't it the mother's opinion that the pro-choice people are always screaming about in the first place?
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Yeah, that was the whole point of why they had to change the drugs:
The new drugs were used because European-based manufacturers banned U.S. prisons from using their drugs in executions — among them, Danish-based Lundbeck, which manufactures pentobarbital (pentobarbital being the "general anesthetic in general surgeries").
An old post on that exact topic was even referenced in TFA, but to provide it again
http://science.slashdot.org/story/13/10/25/1223203/us-executions-threaten-supply-of-anaesthetic-used-for-surgical-procedures
Honestly, I don't see why they just don't go back to the good ol' guillotine. Certainly much quicker and more humane than 10 minutes of gasping. And if it's not "perfectly humane"? Well, neither was the rape and murder of a 22 year old woman.
Thousands of people are put under every day for surgery. Why not use the same tried and proven method of doing that to put the condemned out like a light? Then when he's totally out of it, cut his head off. We still know how to make guillotines, don't we? And when the French were using those to kill people, the ones being killed were wide awake.
An added benefit is that it might just get the attention of some politicians.
So whats your take on abortion?
Seems to me that both the liberals and conservative pick and choose which humans have rights and which ones don't. The guy I am replying to is a flaming liberal (see his other posts in other stories) so therefore defends a womans right to terminate her unborn human child.
He will have a ready excuse for why a human in fetus form doesnt deserve rights: he will claim that the human in fetus form is less than human, but the "less than human" argument is the same that the conservatives make about murderers, and in history its the same argument that the Democrats used to support their need to own slaves (they very specifically defined black people as only 3/5th human, and therefore OK to do whatever you wanted to them.)
At least the conservatives, with their hypocritical stance, are on the side of defending innocent human life while throwing heinously guilty human life to the wolves. The liberals have no such high horse to ride upon in their own hypocrisy.
"His name was James Damore."
She was tortured and killed. Those are bad things. Torturing and killing are bad.
Which is why civilised people don't torture and kill.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
I've always been confused about why we use drugs to begin with. Nitrogen asphyxiation works painlessly, there is no suffocation, the person just falls asleep and a few minutes later is brain dead. The room doesn't even need to be pressurized, just well sealed. Lead the person in, sit them down and secure them, then leave and turn on the nitrogen. Few minutes later, during which he is free to say his last words, he falls asleep and dies a few minutes later.
I'm not against all of the additional costs, mind you, in this day and age we ought to be damn sure we're executing the right person.
well spoken. In fact you touched on another reason to do away with the death penalty: Suppose you convict and execute the wrong guy. You have just committed a double error in that an innocent is dead, and the real criminal will likely never be found and caught. Has there ever been a case where the wrong person has been executed, and then the real criminal is caught and successfully prosecuted? IANAL, but I don't think I have ever heard of such a thing....
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I believe that if we took the death penalty seriously as a society, and actually used it, it would stop being an empty threat
Let's say that for the sake of the argument the only ones deserving the death penalty are those who kill other people.
And let's discard those who have done so by accident. We just want the people who have done that on purpose.
Who kills another person on purpose? As a civilian, not employed by the government, in peace time, in self defense, not trying to prevent someone else to commit murder...
Who are the premeditated murderers?
You got two groups. Mentally deranged people and criminals.
Now... Mentally deranged people are mentally ill. THAT is the reason they commit murders.
Giving them the death penalty is basically killing people for being sick.
Also, do you really believe that the insane person will take heed of the threat of death penalty?
Either being with a long history of mental illness or just cracking and loosing it for a moment under the influence of stress, drugs or whatnot.
Some of them even believe that they are doing god's work and that there are really good things waiting for them if they martyr themselves.
So, we're left with the other group - criminals.
The kind of people who's "job description" involves "every day you may be shot and killed by police, your friends, your competition, family members and many other people not listed above".
So, you're threatening the people who are already living each day expecting to be killed - with killing them unless they are killed first by almost everything and everyone in their life.
Where's the deterrence factor then? Who is being deterred?
As for prisons being unpleasant... there is no need nor value from that.
I'd much rather have the criminals be reformed and taught to control their impulses while being taught how to get out of the life of crime than being trained to be "harder".
As for giving the prisoner the choice, you can't have that on account that the death penalty is punishment.
You can't have the prisoner making the choice cause that would be like letting him/her commit suicide.
And suicide, in the mentally deranged world where the death penalty is the remnant from the time when it was viewed as sending someone to be judged by a "higher power" than earthly laws (which is why they get priests and whatnot) - is both a sin AND the prisoner escaping prescribed punishment.
In the world that forgoes on the "sending them to god to be judged" bit, it's simply escaping the prescribed punishment.
I.e. Red tape. It has to be done by the book.
Not just to kill the prisoner but to make sure that he/she is really dead or some may try to game the system.
And that's without going into the whole "cruel and unusual" thing.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Anecdote time.
I for one got attacked, ringed, and beaten by three guys while walking home at night. It gave me PTSD. Seriously, every time I walked past someone who looked remotely similar to my attackers, I wanted to have a gun, pull it out, and shoot them in the face. At all OTHER times, I desperately wanted to be sure I'd never have a gun, for I could see I'd kill an innocent person. This got worse and worse, until in prayer I got back that I had to give up all thought of defending myself or even my family with violence. When I offered that up, the PTSD evaporated.
Fast forward to six years later, in Lithuania. My wife looked out her window and screamed. I came running, and she pointed to a guy down in the parking lot who was kicking a woman to death. She was unconscious; He'd pull back his leg for a good, full-swing kick, let loose, and her head would go up about a foot, and the ragdoll would flop to the ground again. Well, the Bible says you shall not let an innocent person be put to death, so I had to go running out there. I was terrified, because this guy was nuts with violence, and I couldn't use violence. I especially didn't want my wife, who was watching, to see me fall in that thing.
So I went out, and tried to reason with him, and he started explaining why she really needed a good beating to death, and I responded that you still can't do that... so she started coming to. He turned around, saw it, and went to say, come on, let's go. I thought, "he's going to take her away somewhere private and finish the job", so I interposed my hands between him and her. He turned on me with a viciouse harvester to my temple, knocked me back. I made the sign of the cross with my arms, and a it absorbed a roundhouse kick that threw me back about eight feet. At this point, I thought that the cross with the arms was too martial or anti-vampire-like, so I changed it to a hand-wave sign of the cross blessing, and said God bless you. He shook himself, looked around, and saw that the girl's sister was leading her away. He followed them at 100 feet; I followed him at 100'; and after a bit I realized a police van was following ME at 100'. we went a quarter of a mile, and the sister turned to the guy, told him to run away, get outta there, pointed to the police van. He left.Then they pulled up next to me, said that they had seen everything, and would pick him up later. They knew who he was and where he lived.
In a way, it was all very comical.
But it also points out two things: yes Christians really are supposed to take Jesus seriously, and no, He doesn't leave them defenseless. Just, his defenses are other than you would expect, and where war is the result of the ultimate of clumsiness, Jesus' defenses for His people are anything but clumsy.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's