Deborah Denno comments to the Los Angeles Times about an Ohio inmate’s drawn-out execution that led to an outcry about the increased use of new lethal injection drugs by the country’s 32 death penalty states, a practice that experts predict will lead to more problems.
Difficulties arising from new drug protocols not only raise the question of whether inmates’ rights are being violated, but whether executioners are making mistakes, said Deborah Denno, a professor at Fordham Law School who has researched the death penalty for two decades.
There have been long-standing problems with administering lethal injections, she said, citing instances in which corrections officials couldn’t find an inmate’s vein, or let a syringe pop out of an inmate’s arm.“I’m certainly not sympathetic to these people. But that’s irrelevant,” Denno said of condemned prisoners. “The department of corrections in Ohio, they were incompetent. They did the wrong thing. It was not supposed to turn out that way — it was a procedure that was supposed to go smoothly.”
Read the entire Los Angeles Times story.