Lethal Injection Could Be Dangerous
"There is no evidence in the record to suggest that the drug obtained from a foreign source is unsafe....."
Decision by US Supreme Court regarding a lethal-injection drug (1)
The 5-4 decision quoted in part above reversed the orders by a federal judge in Phoenix, Arizona, and the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that temporarily halted the execution by lethal injection of Jeffrey Landrigan, who had been convicted of murder in 1989.
The issue was the drug sodium thiopental, a poison no longer manufactured in the United States. Arizona prison officials had obtained the drug from a British manufacturer. Lawyers for Landrigan sought to halt the execution on the grounds that the foreign drug was "unsafe" for its intended use. The US District Court in Phoenix agreed, as did the 9th Circuit.
Since I am not a lawyer, I cannot fathom how a drug made to kill people could be "unsafe for its intended use." Since the lawyers for the condemned man had no evidence that the drug would not work as intended, the majority (2) of the Supreme Court let Arizona go ahead and use it . Guess what? It worked perfectly! ( Even so, Landrigan lived 21 years after being sentenced to death, over two decades more than his victim had.)
Wisconsin abolished the death penalty in 1853, and I do not advocate re-instating it. If I could be shown that the death penalty saves the lives of innocent people by deterring murder, I would be for it. But the evidence from other states indicates that it has no appreciable effect. It does not even draw serial killers to Wisconsin; Ted Bundy killed 12 women in Texas and Florida, the states with the highest execution rates in the country, and he died for it. (Had he done so only in Wisconsin, he might still be alive.) Jeffrey Dahmer killed 18 men here, but he was from Milwaukee originally, and was murdered in prison.
But the death penalty is constitutional, and most states and the federal government still use it. Lethal injection, even using foreign drugs, is actually less cruel than any of the methods used when the Constitution and Bill of Rights were adopted (mostly hanging and shooting.)
To me the appeal based upon the questionable "safety" of the British thiopental is absurd. It reminds me of the story about how a rat poison was taken off the market because laboratory tests proved that a red dye ingredient caused cancer-----in rats.
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(1) McClatchy News Service, October 28, 2010.
(2) Justices Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Kennedy and Scalia voted to reverse the stay of execution; Justices Sotomayor, Breyer, Ginsburg and Kagan voted to uphold it.
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Decision by US Supreme Court regarding a lethal-injection drug (1)
The 5-4 decision quoted in part above reversed the orders by a federal judge in Phoenix, Arizona, and the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that temporarily halted the execution by lethal injection of Jeffrey Landrigan, who had been convicted of murder in 1989.
The issue was the drug sodium thiopental, a poison no longer manufactured in the United States. Arizona prison officials had obtained the drug from a British manufacturer. Lawyers for Landrigan sought to halt the execution on the grounds that the foreign drug was "unsafe" for its intended use. The US District Court in Phoenix agreed, as did the 9th Circuit.
Since I am not a lawyer, I cannot fathom how a drug made to kill people could be "unsafe for its intended use." Since the lawyers for the condemned man had no evidence that the drug would not work as intended, the majority (2) of the Supreme Court let Arizona go ahead and use it . Guess what? It worked perfectly! ( Even so, Landrigan lived 21 years after being sentenced to death, over two decades more than his victim had.)
Wisconsin abolished the death penalty in 1853, and I do not advocate re-instating it. If I could be shown that the death penalty saves the lives of innocent people by deterring murder, I would be for it. But the evidence from other states indicates that it has no appreciable effect. It does not even draw serial killers to Wisconsin; Ted Bundy killed 12 women in Texas and Florida, the states with the highest execution rates in the country, and he died for it. (Had he done so only in Wisconsin, he might still be alive.) Jeffrey Dahmer killed 18 men here, but he was from Milwaukee originally, and was murdered in prison.
But the death penalty is constitutional, and most states and the federal government still use it. Lethal injection, even using foreign drugs, is actually less cruel than any of the methods used when the Constitution and Bill of Rights were adopted (mostly hanging and shooting.)
To me the appeal based upon the questionable "safety" of the British thiopental is absurd. It reminds me of the story about how a rat poison was taken off the market because laboratory tests proved that a red dye ingredient caused cancer-----in rats.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
(1) McClatchy News Service, October 28, 2010.
(2) Justices Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Kennedy and Scalia voted to reverse the stay of execution; Justices Sotomayor, Breyer, Ginsburg and Kagan voted to uphold it.
w
Labels: execution, injection, Supreme Court
posted by Gerald S Glazer at 12:49 PM
1 Comments:
Well as a veterinarian and medical researcher I have actually used (and I currently use) the drug multiple times in many animals for both surgical procedures as well as euthanasia. Thiopental sodium or sodium pentathol works extremely well for both purposes, and in fact for euthanasia and for mamy types of surgeries in certain animals there is nothing better.
Thiopental sodium is a barbiturate that produces profound anesthesia as well as analgesia. It kills by causing respiratory depression and cardiovascular callapse, but by the time these effects occur the organism is totally unconscious and insensitive to pain or anything.
If pentathol is not "safe" as a euthansia agent then nothing is safe, but I suspect that this was the purpose of the decision by those who supported the decision of the 9th circuit court.
But the most important aspect of this case isthat the two new super-liberal Supreme Court apppointees by Obama, i.e., Kagan and Sotomayor, voted to uphold the decision by the 9th Circuit court that banned the drug.
We are in for more illogical and idiotic decisions by these two for decades to come.
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