Deborah Denno comments to the Austin American-Statesman on how lethal injection faces increasing scrutiny nationwide with states scrambling to keep their death chambers operating as their supplies of drugs run short, and because of that, critics of the death penalty say, the execution process is much more haphazard than it once was.
Added Deborah Denno, a law professor and death penalty expert at New York’s Fordham University: “The process has always been sloppy, but it’s getting much riskier from a constitutional standpoint, in my view. There used to be a pretense that the three-drug method was humane.
“Now, there is no such pretense. States are switching to whatever drug they can get.”
She and Denno said the fast switches of drugs could portend legal issues ahead — because, as McCracken says, it seems to be occurring “with little or no medical examination or input. … Are (states) approaching this from the standpoint of what’s most humane, or are they just looking at what’s most expedient?”
“This has always been a sloppy process from the start, and recently it seems to have gotten worse now than it ever was,” Denno said. “Any attorney now worth their salt will be challenging the lethal injection procedure.”
Read the entire Austin American-Statesman story.
