Waiting to die

You can argue all day about the efficacy of capital punishment. Does it curb crime? Is it justice or revenge?

One consistent argument from the pro-execution side is that to be effective, justice should be swift and punishment certain. One reason capital punishment may not deter, this argument goes, is that it is not consistently carried out.

Swift, sure, certain. And then there’s the Kentucky way.

The official Kentucky death row protocol for administering lethal injections was released Wednesday, by order of the U.S. Supreme Court, which is considering the cases of killers Ralph Stevens Baze and Thomas Clyde Bowling Jr., challenging the constitutionality of the procedure.
It turns out that if the first dose of the three-drug cocktail doesn’t work – why it might not work is not explained – the executioners are to try again after 10 minutes. Why wait 10 minutes? Why wait 10 seconds?

The 16-page protocol also goes into some detail about how to save the prisoner’s life if a last minute reprieve happens to come through. A medical crash cart and heart defribrillator must be standing by. Can you imagine being the guard ordered to try reviving a prisoner you just injected with lethal poison? Oops!

The first of the three drugs in the cocktail, sodium thiopental, is supposed to paralyze. So if things don’t go as planned, or that last minute phone call from the governor comes just after the procedure has started, the prisoner could be lying conscious, but paralyzed and unable to speak, while the executioner either reloads the syringes or starts warming up the heart paddles. It sounds positively Kafkaesque, not to mention cruel and unusual.