A lethal injection of reality: medicalizing executions helps maintain support for the death penalty.

• Author: Sullum, Jacob
• Position: Columns - Column

Sixteen minutes into last May's botched lethal injection at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, the warden closed the blinds on the windows to the execution chamber and turned off the sound so that witnesses could not see Clayton Lockett writhe or hear him moan. The procedure, designed to resemble a medical treatment--albeit one with an involuntary patient and a very low probability of recovery--had begun to look uncomfortably like the cold-blooded killing of a helpless person.

Since Lockett was himself guilty of such a killing, having been convicted of shooting a 19-year-old woman during a burglary and watching as his accomplices buried her alive, many Americans would say justice was done. But the eagerness of death penalty advocates to address the shortcomings revealed by Lockett's drawn-out demise suggests that majority support for capital punishment depends on sanitizing the practice to conceal its true nature.

Thomas Szasz, the late critic of coercive psychiatry and the "therapeutic state," argued that "physician-assisted suicide," which gives terminal patients access to lethal drugs by prescription, misleadingly medicalizes a moral issue. The same is true of "physician-assisted execution," with the added complication that most people with medical expertise do not want to assist executions because they view it as contrary to their professional ethics.

That reluctance seems to have been the main reason it took so long to kill Lockett, who died of a massive heart attack more than an hour and a half after he was wheeled, strapped to a gurney, into the execution chamber. A technician spent 51 minutes looking for a suitable vein, finally settling on Lockett's groin.

The needle evidently was not inserted properly, because Lockett was still conscious after the first drug sent through the IV tube--midazolam, a benzodiazepine--should have knocked him out. It seems he therefore could feel the suffocating effect of the next drug, the paralytic agent vecuronium bromide, and the burning, muscle cramps, and chest pain caused by the potassium chloride that was supposed to stop his heart.

Witnesses reported that Lockett twitched, repeatedly tried to sit up, and mumbled "oh, man" after he was...