Deborah Denno comments to Chemical and Engineering News on how problems with executions seem only to be mounting as supply challenges force execution teams to turn to untested drug providers and change protocols on the fly.
The current situation is “chaos,” says Deborah W. Denno, a law professor at Fordham University who has researched and written about capital punishment extensively. “The more information that states reveal, the more we realize that they don’t know what they’re doing,” Denno says.
Law professor Denno calls the current environment surrounding lethal injections chaotic. Sarat calls it human experimentation. As for whether the difficulties can be addressed to ensure that capital punishment is humane, Sarat is cautious. “There’s a temptation to say ‘if only,’ as in ‘if only we had specialized doctors doing it, these problems would be eliminated,’ ” Sarat says. But the progression of execution methods over time has been a sequence of “if only” desires that led from one imperfect approach to another. In evaluating lethal injections and whether they are, in fact, neither cruel nor unusual, Sarat says, people need to be more interested “not in ‘if only’ but in what actually happens.”
Read the entire Chemical and Engineering News article.