Deborah Denno comments to the New Yorker on the story of the death penalty in this country and how it illustrates a characteristically American faith in a technological solution to any problem.
That suggests a more logical process than actually took place. In 1977, state legislators in Oklahoma asked Jay Chapman, the state medical examiner, to come up with a more contemporary method of execution. As he later told Deborah Denno, a professor at Fordham law school, he “was an expert in dead bodies but not an expert in getting them that way.” Still, he devised what became known as the “three-drug protocol.” A prisoner is injected first with sodium thiopental, a barbiturate anesthetic; then with pancuronium bromide, a muscle relaxant; and, finally, with potassium chloride, which causes cardiac arrest. Chapman’s protocol was first used in Texas, in 1982, and it quickly became the national standard.
Read the entire New Yorker story.