John Duty: human guinea pig in Oklahoma's cruel experiment

When Texas first used lethal injection on 7 December 1982, it was meant to usher in an era of a kinder, gentler method of capital punishment. "Fry 'em" or "String 'em up" used to be the harsh mottos of the executioner, but after the horrors of the electric chair and the gallows, some hoped that nobody would find the needle so objectionable.

Some find it counterintuitive that an anaesthetic can cause pain during an execution, but if the anaesthetic does not work, then the prisoner is first paralysed and then poisoned in a particularly painful way. Unfortunately, the probability of such a mistake is very high, no matter what the drug the executioner may use.

Doctors' ethics prohibit them from taking part in an execution, so the prison must ask one of its employees to mix up the drugs, and then "administer" them. This helps to explain why postmortems in the three most recent executions in Tennessee show insufficient anaesthetic in the prisoner's bloodstream: he was not rendered unconscious. He did not die the painless death that the executioners advertised, but slowly suffocated as the other drugs took effect, an excruciating death.

Oklahoma has chosen to turn to the vets for help. They have asked the court for permission to execute John Duty on 16 December – just in time for Christmas – with [pentobarbitol], the drug the vets currently use to kill dogs. This is, they suggest, a kindness. Unfortunately, they have found a judge in Oklahoma to agree with them.

As ever, it is not that simple. Drugs that work for animals may or may not have the same effect on humans. So, John Duty would become a human guinea pig, and we'll just have to see how much he suffers.

Click here to read the full article.

Related story and update: 'Oklahoma executes John Duty with drug used to euthanize animals', Dec. 17, 2010

Source: Clive Stafford Smith, guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 23 November 2010

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