Deborah Denno appears on CNN’s Amanpour to discuss the decisions of Great Britain, Italy, Denmark, all manufacturers of drugs that are used in lethal injections refusing to sell them to America’s executioners.
Deborah Denno is a professor at Fordham University Law School and an expert on death penalty law. And she joins me now here in the studio.
Thank you for being with me.
DEBORAH DENNO, DEATH PENALTY SCHOLAR: Thank you.
AMANPOUR: Tell me the significance of the latest, which is the British have said they are not going to send any longer a certain drug to the United States.
DENNO: Well, this is very significant because it means that Department of Corrections are going to be once again halted from their ability to execute unless they find another drug or get more of what they’re looking — they’re using now.
AMANPOUR: So let’s talk about what they’ve been using or they’ve been relying on. It’s a cocktail of drugs.
DENNO: That’s right. Three drugs. The first is a sedative that’s supposed to make the inmate unconscious. The second has been a paralytic agent that literally paralyzes the inmate. The third is sort of the absolutely fast-killing drug that kills the inmate off.
AMANPOUR: And what’s been denied?
DENNO: What’s being denied are the second and the third drugs. What’s happening is states have started simply to use one drug. They started doing this in 2009. They ended in 2009, and they’re — you — we’ve started to see this shift, number one. Number two, they’re just using the sedative, which as you were explaining, is very hard to get now.
AMANPOUR: So if you were a proponent of the death penalty, if you’re in the corrections department, what’s wrong with just using this one drug?
DENNO: Well, there, you know, several things. I mean, first of all, who’s doing the execution? I mean, often these we have found they’re using untrained people. No matter what drug you use, they don’t know how to inject them or what — quite what to do. This is a prison setting. It’s not a hospital. It’s a prison setting, which means that there aren’t the availabilities of — to ensure humane process, et cetera. There are a lot of problems.
AMANPOUR: But, again, why is it so specifically difficult with just one drug versus the cocktail?
DENNO: Well, the one drug would have affected the cocktail as well. The reason why the cocktail is no longer used is because the second and third drugs were also very problematic. The second drug was a paralytic agent.
It was creating a lot of death penalty challenges in this country because it was clear that there was very humane that in many executions that the inmate was aware and conscious, but simply paralyzed and couldn’t scream out. So states are getting rid of those two drugs —
AMANPOUR: (Inaudible) very inhumane.
DENNO: Very inhumane. It was causing a lot of problems. It actually caused us a halt in execution methods for about eight months in this country in 2008.
AMANPOUR: What is behind the European countries that we listed not wanting to send these drugs?
DENNO: Well, European countries, these particular European countries don’t have the death penalty. They don’t want to be part of our execution process. And they don’t want their drugs, which they have created for medical humane purposes to be used to kill people. That’s not why they were created and that’s not their purpose.
AMANPOUR: Is that decision not to send these drugs, will it affect the death penalty here, or rather the number of people who are executed here?
DENNO: Well, certainly had an effect on the number of people who were executed here. If you don’t have the drug to execute people, you can’t use them, and do the executions, number one. And number two, states have started scrambling, looking for other drugs.
When they do that, that creates legal challenges, because they end up using drugs that they shouldn’t be using or getting them from places where they shouldn’t be getting them.
AMANPOUR: And it is kind of weird to use the word humane about killing somebody. Nonetheless, that is a legal term and it’s used in this regard.
What would be the most humane way of killing people on death row after the lethal injection method?
DENNO: Well, we have five methods of execution in this country. The one, ironically, that has been proven to be the most humane is the firing squad. There have been three firing squad executions in this country in modern times, and they’ve all gone off without a hitch. The irony is, of course, is that people think that’s the most brutal method. They associate that —
(CROSSTALK)
AMANPOUR: I mean, I’m shocked to hear you say that.
DENNO: That’s right. I mean, most people are, because you would associate that with the most brutal countries in the world. But nonetheless, at least in this country, that’s been found to be the most humane.
AMANPOUR: Tell me about the politics. Give me a sense of the change in the way people are looking at it today.
DENNO: Well, until very recently, I mean, the majority of the country was for the death penalty. Indeed, in opinion polls more than 50 percent of Americans still are for the death penalty when they are asked. However, that percentage has been declining and it depends also in the way you ask the question.
Number one, and I think people view the death penalty very differently. If you give them the option of life without parole, for example, they will prefer that over the death penalty.
AMANPOUR: And as we’ve discussed whether these injections, the inability to make this cocktail is going to affect the death penalty and its frequency, let me just put up for everybody to see a list of the countries where execution is most common, and they are China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and the United States.
Notwithstanding what you’ve just said about the level of popular support for it, should the United States today, 2012, be on that list of countries?
DENNO: I think it’s an embarrassment for the United States to be on that list of countries. And I think it’s slowly have an impact on how people view the death penalty in this country.
AMANPOUR: You know, those people who do support it say now to arguments such as yours that it’s just really nitpicking. You haven’t been able to get rid of the death penalty, so you’re now nitpicking about process. Let me read you what somebody said.
“Death penalty opponents can’t win on the substance of the death penalty and so they’re being very nitpicky about procedures and are attacking it in any way they can,” that claim by “The Washington Post.”
Is that what’s happening, or do you see a tidal change in this whole issue?
DENNO: Since 1999, there has been a steep decline in the number of executions in this country. This isn’t nitpicking. This is talking about our rights and what we hold most deeply in this country, how people are executed, that they be executed humanely, that there not be racism, that execution’s not the — toward the lower income class, the innocent people, et cetera.
These are what we hold most dearly, values that we’ve always had. That’s not nitpicky.
AMANPOUR: Several state governors had had an impact. They have — whether it was the former governor or Illinois, who declared clemency in 2003 for death row inmates and other governors, have decided to take a stand. Given states’ rights, rules so often in this country, is that going to make a — sort of, again, a major shift, a tipping point?
DENNO: Absolutely. You haven’t seen this many politicians speaking out that strongly against the death penalty in the past. That would have killed someone’s chances.
There — it’s also demonstrating that there’s a deep ambivalence toward the death penalty in this country. It’s really just a few states who are actively engaged in it, for the most part, even the states who have the death penalty on the books are not executing people and they haven’t been for a long time.
Read the entire CNN Amanpour transcript.
