Last week's botched execution in Ohio has raised questions for many people about the ethics of experimenting with untested lethal injection protocols. But it’s not clear that the standard drug protocol is any less cruel, even if it is less unusual.
On Thursday, January 16, Dennis McGuire was injected with a combination of the sedative midazolam and painkiller hydromorphone. Witnesses report that he gasped, snorted, and struggled for air for over ten minutes before being pronounced dead. Why would Ohio turn to such a controversial and untested execution method?
Since 2011, one of the drugs in the standardized lethal injection protocol has become unavailable thanks to a combination of global capitalism and European law. This protocol consists of three drugs: sodium thiopental (an anaesthetic), 2) pancuronium bromide (a paralytic), and 3) potassium chloride (an electrolyte which, administered in the right way, stops the heart). Until recently, the only US manufacturer of the first drug, sodium thiopental, was Hospira.
But in January 2011, Hospira announced that it would no longer manufacture the drug. For financial reasons, they had shifted production of sodium thiopental (or Pentothal, as they call it) from North Carolina to Italy. But given the EU ban on capital punishment, Italian authorities demanded that Hospira exclude its use in executions. In order to avoid "the risk that we will be held liable by the Italian authorities if the product is diverted for use in capital punishment," Hospira stopped manufacturing the drug.
In response to the shortage of thiopental, some states introduced a new, one-drug protocol using pentobarbital, a drug that vets often use to euthanize dogs. But again, European manufacturers banned its use in executions, and existing supplies of the drug are running out across the States.
In response to this situation, some states have turned to compounding pharmacies to mix execution drugs to order. But this raises a whole new set of ethical, practical, and legal questions: How will the mixture of execution drugs be regulated and tested? Do manufacturers have the right to secrecy, or does the public have the right to know who makes the drugs that are used to kill in their name? Just last week, the state of Missouri was accused of improperly storing execution drugs from a compounding pharmacy in Oklahoma, based on erroneous instructions they received from the pharmacy.
But even if the standard drugs are used and the proper instructions are given and followed, it’s not clear that there is any good way to execute a person. The man who invented the three-drug protocol in 1977 admitted years later that he “was an expert in dead bodies but not an expert in getting them that way.” In 2009, the state of Tennessee used this protocol to execute Steve Henley. It took 14 minutes for him to die. His face turned blue, and then purple. It seems that he suffocated to death while paralyzed.
As Colin Dayan writes:
The “painlessness” of lethal injection depends on an excessive saturation of the body with chemicals. This “ethics of care” always remains what Sister Helen Prejean once called “an elaborate ruse.” The familiar surround of a clinic, as I once wrote in “The Blue Room in Florence,” “offers the guarantee that this body-altering penetration has the prestige of a healing process.” But the odor of death cannot be redeemed.
Rather than looking for kinder, gentler mechanisms for state killing, we should admit that there is no good way to execute a person.
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