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Lethal Injection

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Lethal Injection
Executing condemned prisoners by lethal injection is cruel and unusual punishment and should not be legal. Lethal injections are the most common procedure of capital punishment in the United States today, but it does not mean that it is the most civilized. Several states use the three-drug protocol, with sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide, and potassium. The other method is by injecting a large dose of barbiturate. Several problems can occur with these methods and cause excoriating pain and torcher. Physicians stand under the Hippocratic’s Oath to save people lives, not to kill them, often inexperienced technicians and orderlies carried out the injections of the drugs. It is cruel and inhumane to let untrained workers administer drugs to the prisoners when the result could in up badly. There are too many what ifs in this procedures and risk. Just because prisoners take a life does not mean we should.
Lethal injection is used in 36 states and the federal government has adopted this method of execution. The first drug that is inserted into the prisoner vein is sodium, thiopental which is an anesthetic that puts the inmate to sleep. Once the inmate is asleep then pancuronium bromide is injected. This drug paralyzes the entire muscle system and stops the inmate’s breathing. After that, potassium chloride is injected and it stops the heart (CQ Press, 2012). This procedure sounds simple, but it is not.
There can be too many potentials problems that can occur with lethal injection. The prisoners can make it difficult for the medical staff to find a vein, and the mixture of the drugs could be wrong or the direction of the flow is incorrect. The medicine could be administers into tissue instead of a vein. The prisoners may not react normally to the drugs given. The end result is the inmate will experience excoriating pain and will not be able to communicate with anybody because of the possibly of the inmate being in cardiac arrest or paralyze. Various executions


References: CQ Press. (2012). U.S. Supreme Court on Use of Lethal Injection in Death Penalty Cases April 28, 2012 from http://debates.cqpress.com/DeathPenalty/lethalinjection.html Execution Methods. (2012). Retrieved from http://www.aclu.org/capital-punishment/execution- methods Fulkerson, A., & Suttmoeller, M. (2008, December). Current issues involving lethal injection. Criminal Justice Studies, 21(4), 271-282. DOI: 10.1080/14786010802554071 Justices rule lethal injection is constitutional. (2008). Retrieved from Lethal Injection. (2012b). Retrieve on May 7 from http://www.capitalpunishmentuk.org/injection.html Lethal injection: Constitutional Issue. (20012). Retrieved from http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/lethal-injection-constitutional-issue Massachusetts Medical Society. (2006). When Law and Ethics Collide. Retrieved from Public Library of Science. (2008). Ethical Implications of Modifying Lethal Injection Protocols
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