Several Americans think that lethal injection simply involves putting a guilty inmate to sleep forever. While is some cases this may be true, lately there have been serious issues regarding lethal injection. These specific issues are where we obtain the necessary drugs to carry out lethal injection, botched executions and the morality behind lethal injection. Bottom line, the American people need to know how people are being put to death in this country and the issues behind it that they may not know about.
Where do we obtain the drugs necessary to execute someone? Well, the United States used to receive these drugs from Europe. By 2011, Europe put an embargo on the anesthetic sodium thiopental because they did not want it to be used to kill people in the United States. This drug was essential for use in lethal injection. Even smaller drug manufacturers have denied supplying sodium thiopental for similar reasons. Since then, states have used different drug protocols and have even used random cocktails without research and not informing the public. In turn, this has made it rather difficult to put people to death around the country.
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Needless to say, death penalty states that primarily use lethal injection scrambled. This specific anesthetic was vital to perform executions in the United States. For some background on lethal injection, in 1977, the three-drug protocol was introduced by a man named Jay Chapman. This is the drug protocol that was used up until sodium pentothal was banned by Europe and other pharmaceutical companies. Jay Chapman is a medical examiner and claims he has no experience with putting people to death, but rather deals with patients after they have died. Chapman asserts that when he created this drug cocktail he was young and naïve. He claims this is not his profession, that he really did not do much research when putting together the cocktail, and that he does not want to be linked to lethal injection.
Since the shortage of sodium thiopental, states have been creating their own cocktail of drugs that have had dire effects on inmates. For example, Arizona decided to stop using the drug midazolam in 2016 due to it being tied to botched executions. To give you an idea of what was happening in Arizona, a man named Joseph Wood III took over 2 hours to die. It was reported that he was gasping several times, which one could argue that this could violate the eighth amendment. Thus, Arizona decided to stop using midazolam.
Another botched case that is rather popular is the execution of Clayton Lockett. In 2014, Lockett was executed with an untested mixture of midazolam, vecuronium bromide and potassium chloride. Secrecy laws in Oklahoma prohibited the public from knowing which drugs were used in the execution. Lockett’s execution was far from painless. A paramedic tried several times to insert the needle into Lockett’s body. The parts of the body that were attempted were the left arm, the collar bone, the neck, the chest, his foot, and then finally into the femoral vein in his groin. Then midazolam was successfully administered into the vein, but then the needle dislodged and the other two drugs were distributed into the flesh. His vein collapsed where they had inserted the needle. He proceeded to make violent movements and try to speak. Even after declared unconscious, Lockett lifted his head and spoke audibly. Onlookers said it looked like “torture.” Lockett ended up passing away from a heart attack.
This is only scraping the surface of botched executions in the United States. Many things regarding lethal injection in the United States is very shady, since most citizens do not exactly know how it is being carried out behind closed doors. Random drugs are being mixed together without any thought and prisons sometimes do not share where they receive these drugs. Often the person choosing the drugs and doses to be administered has no medical experience. You could argue that since the people being put to death are murderers, they deserve to suffer so who cares. But what if they are innocent? Do we just say “whoops” and brush it under the rug? These are some thoughts that should be considered. This is not how America should be. As Americans, we deserve to know what exactly is going on concerning the death penalty. It is time to question the morality of lethal injection and whether or not we should do away with it completely.
