Deborah Denno was quoted in a Deseret News article about the state of Nebraska’s recent use of the powerful opioid fentanyl to execute a convicted murderer.
Part of the problem of establishing a protocol is that executions in most states are so sporadic that with each one, a new team of people is involved, said Deborah Denno, the Arthur A. McGivney professor of law at Fordham University in New York who has been studying lethal injection since 1990. (The last person executed in Utah was in 2010.)
Also, unlike prescribed deaths of terminally ill people to right-to-die states, physicians aren’t involved. And as pharmaceutical companies wage legal battles to stop states from getting their drugs, the problem is getting worse, she said.
“Not only has this been happening for a long time, but it’s getting worse and more reckless. It’s worse than it’s ever been,” she said, adding that the length of time that it took for Moore to die — 23 minutes — isn’t evidence that the procedure went well. One witness to the Moore execution was a journalist who witnessed a dozen executions in Missouri and said many of them took less than five minutes.
Denno said that death penalty states could potentially solve the problem by agreeing to work together to devise a lethal injection protocol that all would use. There are no federal restrictions beyond the Eighth Amendment, and also nothing prohibiting states from agreeing on a common method with recommendations by experts.
“States could come up with something if they wanted to, but they won’t relinquish their rights,” she said. “But that would be the humane thing to do.”
