Leading experts on the use of medical drugs in capital punishment have accused death penalty states of conducting a “failed experiment” with new drug combinations following a recent run of drawn-out executions in which prisoners have shown signs of distress on the gurney.
“There have been two executions using midazolam and hydromorphone, and both have led to problems. That indicates that it's possible that the combination doesn't work. These are failed experiments with this drug combination,” said David Waisel, associate professor of anaesthesia at Harvard medical school who has acted as an expert defence witness in many capital cases. “Given the two recent events it seems irresponsible to continue trying this combination.”
Mark Heath, a Columbia University anaesthesiologist in New York, and also a lethal injection expert, pointed out that of the 12 executions in which midazolam has been deployed, “four did not really go as you'd expect or want”. He said: "The common theme is that in all of them the prisoner seems to go to sleep but keeps moving or breathing for long after you'd expect that to happen.” He added that the use of midazolam was “at this point clearly a failed experiment”.
It took so long for Wood to die on Wednesday that his lawyers even tried, one hour into the procedure, to persuade a judge to order it be stopped and Wood resuscitated. The transcript of the phone conversation between Wood's lawyer, a federal judge and Arizona state officials revealed both the primitive medical set-up inside the death chamber and the ignorance of officials about basic medical matters.
Jeffrey Zick, a lawyer with the Arizona attorney general's office, told Judge Neil Wake that “Mr Wood is effectively brain dead.” Asked by the judge whether the prisoner had probes attached to his head to prove that he was brain dead, Zick said no, but insisted that a medically trained individual had observed Wood to be in that condition.
But Waisel, the Harvard professor, told the Guardian that someone who is brain dead will stop breathing unless kept alive on a ventilator. “There is no way anyone could ever look at someone and make that kind of diagnosis. He was still breathing, so he was not brain dead. This is an example where they threw out a term that has a precise medical definition, but they didn't know what it means.”
Other independent experts agreed. “If you are taking breaths, you are not brain dead. Period,” said Dr Chitra Venkat, clinical associate professor of neurology and neurological sciences at Stanford University. “That is not compatible with brain death, at all. In fact, it is not compatible with any form of death.”
Source: The Guardian, July 25, 2014