Deborah Denno, the Arthur A. McGivney Professor of Law at Fordham University School of Law and a leading expert on the legal issues surrounding the death penalty, spoke to Yahoo about the Supreme Court’s Glossip v. Gross ruling. The Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling allows states to use midazolam, a drug used during botched executions the past two years.
“It’s like rooting through your kitchen cabinets looking for an aspirin and taking anything that happens to be there,” says Denno of the use of midazolam as the sedative used in current three-drug-cocktail lethal injection administration. It is simply what these states have “turned to out of desperation just to keep executions going.”
Part of the problem with midazolam, Denno noted, is states have no way to test its effectiveness.
“It’s an evil call,” says Denno regarding lethal injection, adding that it’s a “human experiment because we don’t know how it’s going to work.”
“You can’t use the second or third drugs [in the three-drug protocol]on an animal in this country” when putting it down, adds Denno. “The American Veterinary Association will not allow that. But we allow it for human beings. So, we can’t even test these drugs on animals if we wanted to, but we test them on human beings every time we execute people.”
Read Yahoo‘s full article here.
