Deborah Denno quoted in a NPR story about the battle between proponents of the death penalty and its opponents, who have been accused of tossing sand in the gears of the execution process, and then complaining that the system doesn’t work.
“It’s not the defense attorneys who are holding executions up,” says Deborah Denno, a law professor at Fordham University. “Not by a long shot.”
But many of the delays aren’t caused by defense attorneys, rather the very lack of them, Denno says. In California, it can take years for a condemned prisoner even to be appointed counsel, and years more to wait for what is known as a post-conviction hearing.
Denno, the Fordham professor, says there were problems with lethal injections long before states ran out of their preferred barbiturates.
“Botched executions have existed from the very beginning [of the use of lethal injection], since 1982,” she says.
Scrambling For A Solution
Denno notes that the dosage of the sedative midazolam, which many states are now using for executions, has ranged from 10 milligrams to 500 milligrams.
“One state has a botched execution, so they use more or less of the drug because they don’t know what’s causing the problems,” she says. “Every time there’s a problem, states have a little bit more of a challenge saying why they would ever use midazolam again, when it has such a bad record.”
Read the entire NPR article.