Deborah Denno quoted in the Los Angeles Times about the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals’ dramatic unanimous ruling Tuesday that halted Robert Campbell’s execution and granted him a new appeal, hours before Texas could carry out the nation’s first execution since Oklahoma officials botched a lethal injection last month.
Deborah Denno, a professor at Fordham Law School and a death penalty expert, cautioned against assuming that because Texas executes so many inmates, officials have the benefit of experience.
“To assume that they have the volume and people must know what they’re doing is wrong,” Denno told The Times. “You can’t assume the same people perform all executions or that same protocol used, same amount of drug or same drug because this is a compounded pentobarbital in Texas. We don’t know whether the same company is being used, whether one batch looks the same as another. So there’s an enormous amount of variability in this execution.”
Denno said the single-drug lethal injection using a sedative like pentobarbital to induce respiratory arrest has been shown to be more humane and effective with fewer botches, since it only has to be administered once, and does not include a second drug, a paralytic, that has been problematic and led to numerous legal challenges.
Read the entire Los Angeles Times article.