Deborah Denno comments to The Guardian about Ohio becoming the first state in America to put to death a prisoner using a single drug lethal injection — a technique that lawyers and campaigners have criticised as human experimentation.
Deborah Denno, a specialist in execution methods at Fordham University in New York, said on the one hand it was good news that Ohio had dropped the use of a paralytic agent – the second in the three-drug cocktail used by all 35 other death penalty states – because that had been shown to induce extreme pain, but finding veins was still clearly a problem, and the so-called back-up of injecting painkillers into muscle was untested and could lead to a lingering death. She predicted future challenges.
Read the entire Guardian story.