Deborah Denno comments to the New York Times on the execution of Dennis McGuire, which was conducted with a new and untested combination of drugs, and took about 25 minutes from the time the drugs were started to the time death was declared.
Deborah Denno, a law professor at Fordham University and an expert on lethal injections, said that a Supreme Court ruling that upheld Kentucky’s use of a three-drug cocktail for lethal injections in 2008 was based in part on the uniformity of drug combinations across the states.
But she said, as the drugs have become less available, “That’s no longer the case.” She added, “This is a very different world in 2014 than it was in 2008.”
Read the entire New York Times story.