Deborah Denno comments to Slate on the standard set of criteria to determine the way professionals determine the amount of suffering death row inmates can and should endure during their executions.
In the 2008 case Baze v. Rees, the court ruled that the cocktail used in Kentucky—sodium thiopental (an amnestic), pancuronium bromide (a paralytic), and potassium chloride (designed to stop the heart)—was not in violation of the Eighth Amendment. So despite what you read about inmates suffering—Florida convict Angel Diaz took 34 agonizing minutes to die after executioners mistakenly inserted needles into his flesh instead of his veins—the United States considers lethal injection in its current form neither cruel nor unusual. But Deborah Denno, a law professor at Fordham University and an expert on lethal injections, recently told me that “the court’s ruling was based in part on the uniformity of drug combinations across the states.” But as the drugs have become less available, that’s no longer the case. “This is a very different world in 2014,” she said, “than it was in 2008.”
Read the entire Slate article.