New York Times Magazine Examines Lethal Injection

This Sunday's New York Times Magazine will feature an examination of lethal injection across America entitled The Needle and the Damage Done. It is already available online and I encourage you to read it in its entirety. It is incredibly in-depth and provides an incredible insight as to just what this process of systematically killing people entails. Many of the details discussed in the article are rather disturbing but help shed some light on just how broken the death penalty system is in general as well as lethal injection specifically.

A few excerpts:

"For instance, Doerhoff testified that executions in Missouri have taken place in the dark, an execution team working by flashlight, and that the execution team consists of 'nonmedical people.' For most, the day of the execution is 'the first time probably in their life they have picked up a syringe... so it's a little stressful for them to be doing this.'"

"Deborah Denno, a professor at Fordham University Law School, says that what she thinks of as America’s deep ambivalence about capital punishment — our inability to do away with it or to think very hard about it — has meant that Chapman’s story, that of one man making a small and modestly considered proposal that then persists over time, is not unique... She found that many states made errors when creating their own protocols by using drugs that Chapman originally suggested. As Denno wrote in 2002 in The Ohio State Law Journal, 'One of the most striking aspects of studying lethal-injection protocols concerns the sheer difficulty involved in acquiring' those protocols. She found that only one-quarter of the states that used lethal injection specified the quantities of the drugs to be injected."

The story goes on to articulate numerous inconsistencies with procedures and also includes opinions from those who still favor the use of the death penalty and lethal injection.