Deborah Denno was quoted in an AM 720 KDWN article about lethal injection as a form of capital punishment.
Nevada’s plan to put a death row inmate to death using a first-of-its-kind lethal injection plan could be less humane than putting down a pet, the condemned man’s attorneys told the state Supreme Court on Thursday.
Scott Raymond Dozier’s lawyers also point in court filings to a medical expert’s opinion that the proposed three-drug protocol using the sedative diazepam, the powerful opioid painkiller fentanyl and the paralytic cisatracurium poses a “high probability” risk of a “botched execution” resulting in unnecessary and unconstitutional pain and suffering.
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Deborah Denno, a law professor at Fordham University in New York whose writings on the death penalty are cited twice in Dozier’s filing, said the Nevada execution protocol “ignores the medical evidence showing that the paralytic is a problematic drug to use.”
The court filing notes that executions in Arizona were placed on hold after convicted killer Joseph Rudolph Wood took nearly two hours to die in 2014 after receiving a two-drug combination — the anesthetic midazolam and the painkiller hydromorphone.
In Nevada, Denno said, “the circumstances are even worse because the starter drugs they’re using before the paralytic heighten the risk that the person is not unconscious.”
“They could suffer excruciatingly — being conscious, alive and aware of what’s happening as they suffocate,” Denno said. “Because they’re paralyzed, it can be very difficult to tell if they’re suffering.”
This article was also published in the Miami Herald.