Deborah Denno was quoted in a Yahoo News article about lethal injections.
While prisons can often find physicians to preside over executions, the involvement of the medical profession in executions does not always proceed smoothly. In 2006, executions in California halted when two anesthesiologists resigned from participation in the execution of Michael Morales. They quit after finding out that they would be expected to intervene directly if the execution procedure went wrong.
“The Morales case unearthed a nagging paradox. The people most knowledgeable about the process of lethal injection — doctors, particularly anesthesiologists — are often reluctant to impart their insights and skills,” wrote Deborah Denno, a professor at the Fordham University School of Law, in a 2007 paper on medicine and the death penalty.