Deborah Denno comments to the Washington Post on how pharmaceutical companies have halted sales of drugs used in executions, as legal challenges have mounted and medical groups have vowed to ostracize doctors who participate in sanctioned killings leaving states winging it when it comes to carrying out lethal injections.
The fact that there’s no settled, uniform way to conduct lethal injections, and that states have increasingly experimented in recent years with new and varied ways to kill the condemned, is a serious problem, said Deborah W. Denno, a death penalty expert and a professor at Fordham Law School.
“We have a dozen methods of lethal injection out there now,” Denno said. “[States] are not prepared to do this; they’re not knowledgeable to do this, and they don’t want to fess up to all the problems that are associated with something like this.”
She said that as states scramble to find drugs for lethal injections and tinker with different combinations and protocols for execution, they send a message that carrying out death sentences is more of a priority than resolving important ethical and legal questions.
“And that,” she said, “is not a good policy.”
Read the entire Washington Post article.