Deborah Denno was featured in a CNN report about capital punishment in the United States.
Even if you take out the emotional or philosophical questions about capital punishment, the potential for operator error remains, said Fordham University School of Law professor Deborah W. Denno.
Just because physicians, nurses and licensed medical staff participate directly in lethal injection by finding intravenous access or administering the drugs, there’s still a chance something can go wrong, especially outside a clinical setting. If they are not involved at all, the potential for error increases, said Denno, one the nation’s foremost death penalty experts.
The same goes for electrocutions, hangings, firing squads, even the guillotine, she said. Unless there’s an electrical engineer, a hangman, a marksman or a trained guillotine operator running the show, the margin of error increases, Denno said.
“This has always been the problem throughout history: the people performing the executions,” she said. “Why? We don’t train people to be executioners.” The closest thing America has to trained executioners are shooters or marksmen, theoretically making a firing squad the best option for successful outcomes, she said.
But who wants to witness a firing squad? “People are horrified by firing squads because they look so bad, or they get associated with authoritarian regimes,” she said. “Utah is the only (state) that has it, and they’ve been mocked endlessly each time.”