Deborah Denno comments to OpEdNews on how the protracted execution of Dennis McGuire at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility outside of Lucasville also raised questions about lethal injection and whether it is a more humane way of death.
Lethal injection has largely replaced electrocution. Deborah W. Denno, Professor of Law at Fordham University School of Law, has been a leading opponent of death by electrocution since the 1990s, asserting it violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition again “cruel and unusual” punishment. “There’s substantial evidence that suggests electrocution results in a high risk of pain and prolonged suffering,” Denno told the Sun-Sentinel.
“Can people say that for an absolute certainty? No. You can’t interview a dead person. But when the other side comes back and says there’s no evidence of that, that these people die instantaneously, they’re being dishonest.”
But increasingly lethal drugs are looking as just cruel as electrocution, Denno says, because of”grossly inadequate” protocols about which drug are administered, how, by whom and in what quantities and the clandestine nature of lethal injections. (States need to “take their execution procedures out of hiding,” she wrote in a 2007 Fordham Law Review article.)Denno is also concerned about the new and untested drugs used in lethal injections. “We don’t know how these drugs are going to react because they’ve never been used to kill someone,” she told Mother Jones.
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