"One Sentence That Could Help End The Death Penalty In America"
Dennis McGuire struggled, choked, and gasped for air before he finally died,
as his adult children watched on in horror. The state of Ohio used a
never-before-used mix of drugs to kill him, and he appeared to slowly
suffocate to death. Witnesses said the process took about 25 minutes, making it the longest execution since the state reinstituted capital punishment 15 years ago.
When Kelsey Kauffman, a retired Indiana resident and progressive
activist, saw the headlines about McGuire — whose death sparked widespread outrage
about the nature of lethal injections in the United States — she wanted
to do something in response. So Kaufmann started a petition through SumOfUs, a group that allows citizens to organize to advance social justice causes.
Her ask? Get the American Pharmacist Association to add a sentence to its code of ethics to explicitly ban its members from participating in executions.
It may seem like a strange way to respond specifically to McGuire’s
case, but this one change could be an indirect method of inching the
country toward putting an end to executions altogether. “The Association
could help put a stop to the manufacturing and supplying of drugs used
for lethal injections,” Kauffman’s petition, which garnered more than
36,000 signatures, explains, “and help end the use of the death penalty in the U.S. once and for all.”
“I was reading an article last July about an execution that was
postponed in Georgia because the Department of Corrections wouldn’t give
any information to the lawyers or the judges about what execution drugs
were going to be used and where they had gotten them from. The article
mentioned that pharmacists, unlike other medical professionals, are not
banned from participating in executions. And I remember thinking — wow,
that’s surprising,” Kauffman recounted in an interview with
ThinkProgress. “I happen to be opposed to the death penalty. But I’m
especially opposed to the medicalization of the death penalty.”
Almost all major medical associations — the American Medical
Association, the American Public Health Association, the American Board
of Anesthesiology, and the American Nurses Association — prohibit their
members from assisting in executions. These professional associations
believe that taking another person’s life against their will is a
violation of the Hippocratic Oath, and can’t be reconciled with health
workers’ ethical obligation to care for their patients. There can be
stiff penalties for violating that. The American Board of
Anesthesiology, which updated its policy in this area just four years ago, stipulates that members who participate in executions will lose their medical certification.
But, while the American Pharmacy Association (APhA) has a similar code of ethics, the issue of executions isn’t specifically mentioned.
CREDIT: Adam Peck
Kauffman believes that’s an oversight, not a calculated policy position.
“It hasn’t been an issue until now,” she said. It used to be that
“when executions took place, you just got your drugs from some European
distributor. You didn’t have doctors or nurses helping because they’re
banned, so a lot of the problems with executions have centered around
the fact that you have incompetent people doing physical executions —
they can’t find veins, for example. But it’s not been a question of
pharmacists.”
A controversy that hinges on pharmacies
Over the past few years, that’s changed. In 2011, the European Commission imposed tight restrictions
on the export of certain drugs used in executions, citing ethical
issues with the death penalty. A growing number of the European and
Asian companies that make those drugs are now refusing to sell them for
use in executions, too. This international opposition to capital punishment has left American states scrambling
to get the drugs they need to continue executing inmates. And it’s
meant that a small group of pharmacists are now participating in the
executions.
States are turning to so-called “compounding pharmacies” — facilities that are outside of the regulatory scope
of the Food and Drug Administration — to get the ingredients they need
for untested cocktails like the one that killed McGuire. Compounding
pharmacies, which repackage drugs to keep down the cost of filling
prescriptions, are already controversial from a public health
perspective. For instance, in 2012, a compounding pharmacy was
identified as the source of a deadly meningitis outbreak that killed 36 people. Since then, Congress has worked to crack down on these unregulated facilities, although some public health advocates don’t believe the recent legislative push goes far enough.
Some compounding pharmacies have agreed to manufacture the drugs
that states need to kill people, but state officials won’t always
reveal the details. States like Oklahoma and Missouri claim that
publicizing where they’re getting their lethal drugs will result in too
much public pressure on the compounding pharmacies to stop producing
them. So the methods they’re using for executions are increasingly kept secret, and it’s not entirely clear whether they’re violating the Constitution’s prohibition against “cruel and unusual punishment.”
Kauffman hopes that, if the American Pharmacy Association adopts a
new policy position that forbids pharmacists from assisting in
executions, this will all become moot because the employees at
compounding facilities won’t be able to continue supplying these drugs.
And, after attending APhA’s annual meeting at the end of last month,
Kauffman believes senior officials in the pharmaceutical industry are
receptive.
“I look at the American Pharmacy Association as a partner in this
process, and when it comes to almost all of the pharmacists I spoke to, I
see them as future allies,” she said, pointing out that medical
professionals don’t have to be personally opposed to the death penalty
to agree that it’s against their code of ethics to participate in them.
Dr. Leonard Edloe is one of those allies. Edloe, who now serves as a
pastor in Virginia after owning and operating a community pharmacy for
four decades, received a lifetime achievement award from the APhA at its most recent meeting. He believes very firmly in the policy change regarding lethal injection.
“I’ve always been against this method of execution,” Edloe said.
“We’re supposed to be about healing, and this is the exact opposite of
that. I don’t think most pharmacists are aware of the policy. They
should be supportive of this campaign.”
The push to change APhA’s policy has also won the support of most of
the country’s major human rights organizations. Amnesty International,
the American Civil Liberties Union, Human Rights Watch, the NAACP, and
the United Methodist Church are all co-sponsors of SumOfUs’ campaign,
and have signed onto a letter that was sent to the association at the end of last month regarding the issue.
“I hope the Association takes a position that says we’re against it,
and then pharmacists have enough ethical backbone to go along with it,”
Edloe added.
The medical community’s problems with lethal injections
To the average American, lethal injection may seem like the best,
most humane option for the people on death row. But that’s not
necessarily the case.
Since pharmacists are the sole hold-out in this area, the health
workers who typically ensure that injections are administered properly
are barred from overseeing executions. With no experts in the room, the process can go awry.
Medical professionals don’t mince words about what that means in practice. At the end of last year, an anesthesiologist published an op-ed
calling for the abolishment of lethal injection as a method of killing
inmates, claiming that “what appears as humane is theater alone.”
“States may choose to execute their citizens, but when they employ
lethal injection, they are not practicing medicine. They are usurping
the tools and arts of the medical trade and propagating a fiction,”
anesthesiologist Dr. Joel Zivot wrote in USA Today last December.
He went on to explain that the drug shortages and the heightened
secrecy surrounding compounding pharmacies have created an environment
in which inmates are suffering painful deaths. Zivot believes that, if
states want to continue executing people, they must return to the firing
squad or the electric chair.
Writing in Slate, another medical professional, Dr. Matt McCarthy, agrees. “Part of the problem is the terminology: Words like injection and cocktail and gurney
give the illusion that this form of capital punishment is civil,”
McCarthy points out. “This allows, regrettably, for a softening of the
perception of what is actually happening: Medications that were designed
to heal have been repurposed to kill.”
Even the doctor who developed the original three-drug cocktail that has been used in lethal injections since 1977 has publicly come out against it.
In 2007, three decades after Dr. Jay Chapman developed what he thought
was the most humane method of ending a life, he suggested that the
formula should be revisited — pointing out that it’s a complicated method that can fail in the hands of prison officials who aren’t medical experts.
“The simplest thing I know of is the guillotine. And I’m not at all opposed to bringing it back,” he said at the time.
Chapman’s suggestion brings up a central issue with capital
punishment: The moral questions surrounding the death penalty come into
sharp focus when inmates’ lives are ended in more obviously violent and
graphic ways. And that’s exactly what the SumOfUs campaign is counting
on.
Running out of options
Putting a definitive end to lethal injections means that states will have to find an alternate method for killing inmates.
The majority of the states that still allow the death penalty don’t
sanction another method for executing inmates other than lethal
injection. So that would require getting the legislature to pass a bill
to approve one.
But the other options — gas chambers, guillotines, hanging, fire
squads — aren’t necessarily palatable to the American public. Even the
states that technically have back-up methods on the books, like
Missouri, which authorizes the use of a gas chamber to execute inmates, face significant roadblocks to actually putting that type of capital punishment method into practice.
“The [Missouri] attorney general last year asked the governor to
request an appropriation of a million dollars to build a gas chamber.
The governor, who’s very pro-death penalty, basically said — are you
kidding me? In 2014, we’re going to build a gas chamber in Missouri?
Forget about it,” Kauffman recounted. “The gas chamber is simply not
going to come back.”
Similarly, Americans likely won’t be excited about bringing back
hanging, which evokes the United States’ history of lynching black men.
Virginia recently began pushing for the electric chair, but that bill stalled after an executioner testified against it,
saying that electrocution isn’t a good option because it often leaves
inmates’ bodies burned and blistered. And although some lethal injection
opponents are joining Dr. Jay Chapman in arguing for the guillotine,
which is the only method of execution that would allow inmates’ organs
to be harvested, it’s not clear that Americans would actually have the stomach for that — particularly since public support for the death penalty as a whole has already plummeted to a 40-year low. States are running out of real options.
Kauffman believes the most realistic alternative is probably a firing
squad. It’s certainly still gruesome, but it wouldn’t present ethical
issues of medical professionals’ participation or counsel, since we
already train people to be sharpshooters. It’s not just a hypothetical —
at the beginning of this year, lawmakers in Missouri and Wyoming made headlines for proposing authorizing firing squads.
So execution by gunfire may be exactly where the states that don’t
seem likely to give up capital punishment, like Texas and Louisiana, are
headed. But that could also make those states seem particularly
extreme.
“Just getting lethal injections banned does not end the death
penalty. We’re well aware of that,” Kauffman acknowledged. “You’ve got
these outlier states that are really into the death penalty, and they’re
just going to switch to something else. But they’re also going to make
themselves even more isolated than they already are. I think at some
point, they’re going to be so few in number that the Supreme Court is
going to say that the prevailing morality in the nation is that we no
longer do these executions.”
Joined: Nov 27 2012
Location: On de bayou
Status: Offline
Points: 108214
Posted: Apr 10 2014 at 12:49pm
They always be having sympathy for for the wrong people. I don't understand America.
+5
Victim: McGuire, 53, was sentenced to die for the 1989 rape and fatal stabbing of Joy Stewart in Preble County in western Ohio. The 22-year-old Stewart was newly married and pregnant
Everyone deserves not to go out gasping for their last breath victim or criminal. I agree with death penalty but if your going to execute the person kill em and get it over with.
I don't know if I am for the death pen. because they always seem to kill the wrong people~ and also the system in the country is so biased. Sometimes I do feel like pediphiles should get DEATH! But IDK
If he did kill her, what the problem is? Did she get to fall asleep peacefully while getting murked? I'd be satisfied watching you struggle for your last breath for 25 mins if that was my family you killed.
Joined: Dec 15 2006
Location: meh
Status: Offline
Points: 238782
Posted: Apr 11 2014 at 2:37am
no. no. if he was a rapist/murderer/pedophile i'm gone need to him to struggle and piss himself with fear during his death throes. i'm gone need to there to be time for his life to flash before his eyes. fucc dat ninja and any other fiend that thinks that their death should be swift, easy and painless.
no, no, NO!! struggle u fuccer. struggle and feel that sh*t all the way.
Didnt read the article but is this the rapist-murderer whose lawyer told him to struggle thru the process so that it takes a long time to die and his family is now suing the state for millions and lawyer is under investigation?yeah well, fucc him....im all for the death penalty,you wanna cry cruel and unusual punishment yet you violently snuffed the life from someone?gtfoh
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