Deborah Denno comments to the The Sydney Morning Herald on the execution of Dennis McGuire, which has highlighted a growing problem facing the 32 American states now using lethal injection – a critical shortage of the drugs they use to kill.
Fordham University law professor and lethal injection expert Deborah Denno says the McGuire case has added to an ongoing trend of questioning lethal injection and the death penalty more broadly.She notes that lethal injections are carried out in prison settings not properly set up to undertake such a procedure and often undertaken by people not properly trained to administer drugs. In 2009, executioners in Ohio spent two hours trying to get a secure intravenous line into a condemned man called Romell Broom before giving up.
He remains on death row.According to Professor Denno, three states are now considering returning to the firing squad for executions.
“A firing squad would be quick and something we could do at a moment’s notice,” one of the sponsors of the bill, Representative Rick Brattin, told the St Louis Today website last week. “My opinion is they would suffer less than with lethal injection.”
(On this, Professor Denno agrees.)
Read the entire Sydney Morning Herald story.