MACLEAY COLLEGE
Crime and punishment: a search for humanity
Is a pain-free execution ever guaranteed?
By Thea Carley
As Australia mourns the loss of two citizens killed by firing squad in Indonesia after a decade on death row, some US states are considering reinstating firing squads due to shortages of lethal injection drugs.
Despite public outcry and international campaigns against capital punishment, executions are still carried out around the globe. In 2014, 22 countries executed people, according to Amnesty International. Many more have the death penalty as a judicial option.
Capital punishment continues to provoke intense debate. Not just about its validity as a form of justice, but about the apparent brutality of methods used, as well as the psychological impact of keeping people on death row.
Ways to kill - legally
Hanging is the most common method, in part due to the many death sentences handed down in Iran, where it is the favoured method. Three US states – Delaware, New Hampshire and Washington – still authorise hanging as an alternative to lethal injection.
Hanging is straightforward if implemented correctly, said Dr Chris Thompson, a clinical lecturer at the University of Sydney. “It can be done by people with limited skills, patient co-operation is not required [and] it works just about every time.”
But the American public lost their appetite for public hangings in the early 1900s after many a gruesome thirty-minute long lynching. The last hanging in the US was in 1996.
Shooting is the second most common method, with 54 countries using firearms, either in firing squads or (as in China) by a single shot to the head. Australians Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran were executed by a 12-man firing squad on April 29 of this year.
Australian citizens Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran were executed by firing squad in Indonesia on April 29
Source: News Corp Australia
Source: Amnesty International
Unfortunately there is ample room for error.
Dr Tim McCulloch, of the Department of Anaesthetics at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney, reflected on the absence of medical professionals: “It needs a lot of training and skill to know the alternatives, if the simpler methods don’t work first time. And ethically, people who have the training don’t want to be involved in executions.”
Technical faults by staff are frequently the cause of botched executions. In 2006, Florida inmate Angel Diaz clung to life for more than 30 minutes when his executioners missed a vein, injecting the drugs into soft tissue which caused chemical burns.
In April 2014, an Oklahoma death row inmate, Clayton Lockett, took almost two hours to die. Despite the excuse of “vein collapse,” an independent autopsy ruled incompetence.
In fact, studies suggest that the lethal injection is actually botched more frequently than any other method of capital punishment. Researchers at The Daily Beast stated that from 1890 – 2010 around 3 percent of all executions in the US were bungled in some way. Examining the lethal injection, that figure rose to seven percent.
What’s more, they say we cannot point fingers at particular states or blame a single inadequate technology: “Rather, they have happened in every region [of the US] regardless of the frequency of executions carried out.”
Even if the lethal injection is administered without technical error, other research shows that a percentage of those executed could in fact be suffering a painful and prolonged death masked by the effects of the paralysis drug. A study in the journal PLOS Medicine concludes that “those executed may experience suffocation, and therefore… the conventional view of lethal injection as an invariably peaceful and painless death is questionable.”
Dr Thompson explained that the three drugs have to be administered in separate syringes as they are physically incompatible with each other. That increases the chances of one injection in an automated system failing "… and it’s not nice to die without the drug that makes you go to sleep. Paralysing people to death is horrible and was used by the Nazis as a form of torture,” he noted.
When the state of Utah recently discussed reinstating firing squads, a Democratic politician argued that, “If not shot in the heart, the prisoner bleeds to death slowly.” He also raised concern about the impact on the gunmen who may experience “psychological trauma”.
Beheading is the most common method in Saudi Arabia, where the death penalty can be imposed for offences from adultery to sorcery. Firing squads and public stoning are also common.
Gas chambers, considered politically unsound after the Holocaust, are still permitted in six US states. The condemned is advised to take deep breaths to speed up unconsciousness, but the natural instinct is to hold one’s breath, prolonging both the agony and the time it takes to die.
Electrocution is confined to the US, though tales of grisly deaths have diminished the electric chair’s appeal. One of the most notorious cases was that of Pedro Medina in Florida, who despite mental illness, claims of innocence and pleas for mercy, was executed in 1997. It was reported that flames erupted from his head, and his chest was seen heaving heavily after the 2000-volt current had ceased. It was later confirmed that the electrodes had been incorrectly applied.
Homosexuals in Iran and in Syrian cities occupied by Islamic State extremists have been thrown from cliffs and tall buildings, while public stoning is common to both regimes. Sudan practices hanging and stoning but also allows for execution "in the same manner in which the offender caused death”.
A dignified death?
Lethal injection is now the most common form of execution in the US, one of six countries that use it. (China also uses the lethal injection frequently, though the procedure and drugs involved are a state secret.)
Introduced as a more humane method, botched executions and the efficacy of the drugs used have raised doubts about its assurance of a pain-free death.
Dr Thompson explained how the system works. First, a barbiturate, generally sodium thiopental, is injected to induce anaesthesia. It is followed by pancuronium bromide, a powerful muscle relaxant that eventually leads to asphyxiation if the other chemicals fail to bring about death. Potassium chloride is also injected to speed up the heart, with the intent of causing cardiac arrest.
Execution by lethal injection is legal in six countries and 35 US states
c. Mark Jenkinson/CORBIS
To avoid these problems in the US, many have argued that a regulating organisation such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) should be required to certify both the safety and effectiveness of drugs used in executions, as it does for drugs used in animal euthanasia.
Surprisingly, the three-drug combination used in the lethal injection is deemed too inhumane to use on animals in most states. Animal euthanasia is, instead, generally accomplished through injection of a single lethal dose of barbiturate.
According to one legal study, when US states initially discussed adopting the lethal injection they consulted the country’s top veterinarians who suggested the single dose method.
Ultimately, however, legislators opted for the three-drug protocol, ignoring the advice of vets. Why? They were worried the public would object to “treating people the same as animals.” Ironically they developed a system that proved less reliable and likely less humane.
While certain states have recently experimented with a one or two-drug method, this is primarily due to shortages of sodium thiopental. In January 2014 Ohio man Dennis McGuire became the first US inmate to be executed with the drugs midazolam and hydromorphone, despite the fact the effects of this combination were not well understood. McGuire took almost 25 minutes to die.
Torture of the mind
Physical pain aside, critics of capital punishment are quick to highlight the mental agony associated with life on death row. Executive Director of the St James Ethics Centre, Dr Simon Longstaff said, “there’s a kind of psychological terror that can’t ever be eliminated when you set a person’s date for execution… and it creeps slowly towards them.”
Anthony Ray Hinton spent three decades on death row in Alabama. On Good Friday of this year he was set free after new ballistics tests contradicted the only evidence that linked him to two 1985 murders.
According to the Death Penalty Information Centre, Hinton is the 152nd person in the US released from death row since 1973. “I can’t think of a case that more urgently dramatises the need for reform than what has happened to Anthony Ray Hinton,” his lawyer said.
Anthony Ray Hinton, exonerated after 30 years, said his case was built on "racism and a lie."
Source: 24 News Canada
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99 countries have abolished the death penalty for all crimes. The countries that continue to enforce it are far from developing a reliable method of killing. Whatever the mechanics involved in an execution, a humane death cannot be guaranteed.
Undeniably, some legal systems are intent on using the death penalty to inflict suffering as a means of revenge, punishment and deterrence. The stoning of adulterers in Iran is case in point.
“The cruel form of execution may not be an accident of technology nor a lack of resources, but… may even be a deliberate part of what they (the state) are trying to bring about by way of retribution,” said Dr Longstaff.
Other developed countries, like the US, have for a long time struggled to impose death without unnecessary suffering, yet botched executions and the mental torment of death row are inherent and seemingly unavoidable parts of capital punishment.
Societies around the world should now consider whether these factors are an acceptable price to pay for maintaining the death penalty.
- Thea Carley