“The pervasive belief that these, or any, noxious drugs are guaranteed to provide for
a peaceful and painless death must be dispelled; modern medicine cannot yet achieve this. “
Sean Riley∗
Erasmus MC & Duke University,m
Certainly some, if not most, executions and suicides have been complication-free, but this notion has allowed much of the general public to write them off as humane, and turn a blind eye to any potential problems. Executions or PAS have never been as clean as they appear, even with the US’s medicalization efforts during the 1980s.”
“investigation. Reporting and monitoring practices need fundamental improvements, and research must be ramped up.”
“Transparency is critical to knowledge exchange, and knowledge exchange critical to autonomy. Proponents and opponents of each practice alike need to encourage, not fight against, the call for more research into these practices and their implementation.”
Biosciences, 424–434 doi:10.1093/jlb/lsx028
Notes & Developments
Navigating the new era of assisted
suicide and execution drugs
Sean Riley∗
Erasmus MC & Duke University,m
In 2007, after a series of questionable
executions, the Supreme Court imposed a nationwide moratorium on executions as
it granted cert to Baze v Rees, an Eighth Amendment challenge to Kentucky’s three-
drug lethal injection protocol. The court upheld the original three-drug protocol, and
created several influential standard. First, the first drug must render an inmate fully un-
conscious. Second, in order for a protocol to be constitutional, it must not pose ‘a sub-
stantial risk of serious harm’. This risk must be ‘very likely to cause serious illness and needless suffering. ….
ponents would view as a ‘botched’ execution—many believe that the condemned
should suffer a painful and torturous death as punishment for their crimes, while oth-
ers argue that the mere imposition of death by the states is itself immoral and uncon-
stitutional. Austin Sarat, author of Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and Amer-
ica’s Death Penalty, created an extensive review of all ‘botched’ executions in the past
120 or so years. Within it, he found lethal injection to be by far the most problem-
atic of all methods implemented, at a staggering 7.12% botched rate, compared to
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other new and untested cocktails.
The right-to-die advocacy organization, Exit International, publishes a handbook,
3.12% for hanging and 1.92% for electrocution.
Abolitionists have used these statis-
tics in an attempt to rip off the veil over the supposed humanity of execution via lethal
injection—but a closer look into each individual execution shows that Sarat employed
an exceedingly low threshold for an execution to qualify as a botching. At least 23 out of
75 of the supposed lethal injection botched executions seem to qualify as ‘botched’ for
only one reason: the process took longer than 10 minutes—there remains no evidence
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PAS has more rigid definitions, as few would argue that any level of pain is accept- able. But there remains the difficult task of qualifying what counts as a complication when the final expected result is death, and when the alternative is typically a patient’s…
.PAS Drugs