Professor Deborah Denno was quoted in a Newsweek article about A. Jay Chapman, a retired forensic pathologist who was instrumental in developing a method for lethal injection.
Chapman is widely called the “father of the lethal injection.” He even claimed to have coined the term “lethal injection,” according to Deborah Denno, a professor at the Fordham University School of Law who interviewed Chapman for a 2007 Fordham Law Review paper (although, as she notes, the term appeared in a 1954 report on capital punishment). In the late 1970s, when Chapman was Oklahoma’s medical examiner, a state legislator named Bill Wiseman asked him to help come up with a more humane way to kill prisoners than methods such as hanging and the electric chair. At the time, the Supreme Court had just reinstated the death penalty after a yearslong ban, and murderer Gary Gilmore had faced a firing squad in Utah.
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Chapman initially felt he wasn’t qualified. “[My] first response was that [I] was an expert in dead bodies but not an expert in getting them that way,” he once recalled to Denno. He also worried that getting involved with the issue could have a negative impact on his medical career. But he says he had spoken with colleagues in Oklahoma about the Gilmore case and the way he died. “We treated animals more humanely than we did people,” he remembers thinking. “So from that idea was the idea of execution by some pharmaceutical agent.”
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To create the formula, he says, he proposed a “method that was used commonly every day around the world in inducing anesthesia for surgical procedures. So all it entailed was just carrying that to the extreme by using toxic amounts of the drugs involved.” He and Wiseman drafted the language quickly on a notepad, according to Denno.
In May 1977, the Oklahoma Legislature passed a bill based on Chapman and Wiseman’s proposal. The Chapman Protocol—or the Oklahoma Protocol, as it became known—involved three ingredients: sodium thiopental, an anesthetic (“That’s the drug that would make an inmate unconscious,” Denno says); pancuronium bromide, a muscle relaxant (“It literally paralyzes the inmate,” says Denno, who recalls Chapman telling her it was used for the benefit of “the people watching the execution…so the inmate doesn’t jerk around or show signs of looking alive when he’s actually dying”); and potassium chloride, which causes cardiac arrest. (Chapman initially recommended only the first two ingredients; in 1981, he recommended that the third ingredient also be used.)
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The three-drug combination Chapman recommended was widely used until 2009, when the manufacturer of sodium thiopental stopped making the ingredient. Since then, states have improvised. Death penalty opponents have criticized the use of one substitute—midazolam—because of its association with botched executions. The state of Arkansas recently said its supply of that drug was expiring, leading to its attempt to execute eight inmates over 11 days. Starting on April 20, the state executed four inmates over eight days, and courts stayed the other planned executions.
Though prisons no longer use Chapman’s exact “cocktail,” Denno says credit still belongs to the pathologist. Chapman says he doesn’t feel bad that he is responsible for so many deaths, repeating to Newsweek comments he has previously made: “If I hadn’t done it, someone else probably would have. I was asked my opinion. I gave it.”