Deborah Denno comments to the Daily Journal on California’s transition to a new lethal injection method amid court injunctions and other obstacles that have led it to scrap the existing process.
“I don’t know what California officials can do based on the solutions attempted by other states,” said Deborah Denno, a professor at Fordham University Law School. “My current analysis of all death penalty states shows that there is no successful drug or combination of drugs available for execution, and all viable avenues are closed.”
In short, she said, it’s likely the death penalty will not be employed in California, at least not in the near future.
One solution could be to appoint a panel of experts to study, examine and propose a humane execution method that may or may not include lethal injection, said Denno at Fordham.
“Get a panel of experts together and have California – the governor – appoint a commission of experts, as this country did in 1888, to come up with a humane way of executing someone,” she said. Such a panel would be made up of “people who have the kind of background and expertise to do this” and would “not delegate a really big responsibility to Department of Corrections, who are simply unable to meet that burden, that responsibility.”
The entire Daily Journal story ran on August 23, 2013.