Lethal Injection

There are many methods of capital punishment in the United States including lethal injection, electrocution, gas chamber, firing squad, and hanging. However, lethal injection has been deemed the most ethical method of capital punishment in the United States. Lethal injection is practiced in 33 of 50 states in the United States. The other 17 do not practice capital punishment (Death Penalty Information Center, 2016). Life in prison has reflected a better psychological and medical state of mind and body, therefore, is a much less cruel and unusual punishment.

The process of lethal injection in most states involves a sequence of three shots that are delivered through intravenous drips inserted in each arm. The procedure goes as follows;

the first injection is an anesthetic, sodium thiopental.

The drug is a yellowish, hygroscopic powder, stabilized with anhydrous sodium carbonate as a buffer (RxList, 2017). This anesthetic is a fast-acting barbiturate (sleep-inducing drug) that slows the activity of the central nervous system. This shot is not an analgesic (pain killer) that numbs pain nerves, instead it rapidly puts a person into a state of unconsciousness that’s hypothetically deep enough to make pain undetectable. The drug amplifies the effect of GABA, a neurotransmitter that depresses brain activity. The shot blocks the actions of an excitatory brain receptor, AMPA, which acts in many parts of the brain. The state of unconsciousness can be reached in as little as 30 seconds. A single dose is intended to last throughout the last two injections to prevent any pain. The second injection follows a saline that is very quickly flushed through the intravenous line. Saline (a solution of salt in water) is a neutral substance commonly used to push a drug into the bloodstream more quickly. Then, pancuronium bromide is administered. It acts as a

neuromuscular blocker, preventing a nerve messenger, acetylcholine, from communicating with muscles. The result is a complete muscle paralysis, which causes respiratory arrest since the diaphragm—a muscle imperative to pulling air into the lungs—stops working (Sergo, 2007). Theoretically, the first drug administered makes this process painless. Another saline flush, and finally the last injection, potassium chloride. This dosage of chemical floods the heart with charged particles that interrupt its electrical signaling, stopping it from beating (Cooper-White, 2016).

Sometimes these penalties are botched, this means that the procedure is carried out badly or carelessly. The results of Clayton Lockett’s case provide exclusive look at what happens when an execution goes badly. The convicted felon was sentenced to lethal injection in Oklahoma in April of 2016. It was reported that the execution team took precisely 51 minutes to find a vein. All this time Lockett was being poked and stabbed with an IV needle, when the team eventually aimed for the femoral vein deep in Lockett’s groin. Oklahoma stated that the vein had collapsed which, in medical history, is unusual for the thick femoral vein if an IV had been inserted correctly. This caused an infiltration. An infiltration, as defined in The Medical Dictionary, is “the movement of a needle or cannula from within a vessel into the surrounding tissue. The typical symptoms are a slowed flow of fluids, swelling, pallor, coolness of the skin, and discomfort in the area; severity of the symptoms will depend on the amount and type of fluid infused” (Farlex, 2015). After this detrimental infiltration of sodium thiopental, the director of corrections called off the execution. The lethal injection became a life-saving operation. However, it was too late for Lockett. Ten minutes after the first injection was administered, and a hour and 47 minutes after Lockett entered the prison’s death chamber, a doctor pronounced him legally dead.

On February 3, 2016, in Georgia, 72 year old Brandon Jones was scheduled for lethal injection.

The execution team spent 24 minutes unsuccessfully trying to insert an IV into Jones’ left arm, then 8 minutes trying to insert it in his right arm, and when that failed they again attempted to insert it in his left arm. Attempting numerous inserts on the same vein can be very painful for the patient and leave lasting bruising. Then, against several codes of medical ethics, the team’s physician spent 13 minutes inserting and stitching the IV near Jones’ groin. Six minutes later, a point at which the patient should be completely unconscious, Jones’ eyes popped wide open. This means that the drugs were not correctly administered into the bloodstream, we do not know how much pain Jones felt, and it resulted in an extended

death.

Medical declaration of death is met when the heart and brain cease to function.

Cardiopulmonary (relating to the heart) criteria for death are met when a physician determines that efforts to restart a stopped heart during cardiac arrest are ineffective, or that no attempt should be made to restart a stopped heart because the damage is irreversible. Brain death is determined by there being no signs of brain function during neurological examination of a person with a beating heart. These tests, when the brain is dead, document either no blood flow to the brain, or no brain electrical activity and an absence of factors known to produce reversible loss of brain function.

The alternative solution to the death penalty would be life in prison without parole. Although, as stated in ASPE (2016):

The adaptation to imprisonment is almost always difficult and, at times, creates habits of thinking and acting that can be dysfunctional in periods of post-prison adjustment. Yet, the psychological effects of incarceration vary from individual to individual and are often reversible. To be sure, then, not everyone who is incarcerated is disabled or psychologically harmed by it. But few people are completely unchanged or unscathed by the experience. At the very least, prison is painful, and incarcerated persons often suffer long-term consequences from having been subjected to pain, deprivation, and extremely atypical patterns and norms of living and interacting with others.

The psychological effects of life in prison are harsh, but the fact that they are often reversible shows that they are not as harsh as the death penalty. Nearly all psychological studies of incarcerated individuals tend to address the transition from prison to life outside of prison but fail to address life in prison. The ones that do address this imply that our brains adapt to the new lifestyle and behaviors and that new psychological norms are formed. These trends happen in many human situations, they adapt.

Life in prison is a more humane consequence than the process of lethal injection. The evidence suggests that medically and physiologically, life in prison is a less cruel and unusual punishment that capital punishment.