Deborah Denno comments to the Washington Post on the practiced rituals and procedures of Florida’s execution chamber, as well as the state’s plans to execute 55-year-old Robert Henry with a new protocol, which introduced the sedative midazolam into the state’s lethal drug mix, although midazolam had never before been used in executions until Florida adopted it.
In a 2007 article for the Fordham Law Review, law professor Deborah Denno explained how Oklahoma first came up with the idea in 1977.
Like much criminal justice policy, it was based more on hunches and gut reactions than science and empirical data. “At each step in the political process,” Denno wrote, “concerns about cost, speed, aesthetics, and legislative marketability trumped any medical interest that the procedure would ensure a humane execution.” Although government-appointed commissions in both the U.S. and U.K. had by then studied and rejected lethal injection — with the latter finding “a lack of ‘reasonable certainty’ that lethal injections could be performed ‘quickly, painlessly and decently’”— Oklahoma legislators resurrected the idea after the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty with Gregg v. Georgia in 1976. “Seemingly oblivious to prior concerns, American lawmakers emphasized that lethal injection appeared more humane and visually palatable relative to other methods,” Denno wrote.
Read the entire Washington Post article.