Study says Lethal Injection Excrutiating

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Study says lethal injection is excruciating

By Alan Johnson, The Columbus Dispatch
April 24, 2007


A new medical study alleging that lethal injection can cause slow,
painful death was timely but possibly terrifying news for condemned killer James J. Filiaggi.

As Filiaggi, 41, awaited his execution last night in a cell yards away from the death chamber at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility near Lucasville, a medical review concluded that lethal injection could result in slow death, possibly by suffocation, while inmates are conscious but unable to move.

Barring last minute legal intervention, Filiaggi will be lethally
injected at 10 a.m. today. He was convicted and sentenced to death for murdering his ex-wife, Lisa Huff Filiaggi, on Jan. 24, 1994. He chased her to a neighbor's house where he used 9 mm Luger pistol to fatally shoot her in the shoulder
and head.

Gov. Ted Strickland, in what may have been Filiaggi's last chance to avoid execution, denied a reprieve last night. Filiaggi's attorneys asked for more time to pursue litigation challenging lethal injection.

He would become the first man executed in Ohio this year, as well as the first under Strickland's administration, and the 25th to die since Ohio resumed capital punishment in 1999. Strickland rejected clemency for Filiaggi last week, which was the unanimous recommendation of the Ohio Parole Board.

The study was done by the Public Library of Science, an online medical journal. The organization includes heavy hitters from medicine and science, including Harold Varmus, a former director of the National Institutes of Health, a co-recipient of a Nobel prize, and president and chief executive officer of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

The team, which admitted its opposition to capital punishment, reviewed dozens of executions from North Carolina and California, plus others in Florida and Virginia. They considered the weight of prisoners, the amount of chemicals administered and the time it took them to die.

"The person would feel either asphyxiation or the burning sensation associated with the potassium . something like being put on fire," said Dr. Leonidas Koniaris, a surgeon at the University of Miami and co-author of the study.

"You wouldn't be able to use this protocol to kill a pig at the
University of Miami" without more proof that it worked as intended, said Teresa Zimmers, a biologist and the study leader.

The major problem, the study concluded, was that all 37 states, including Ohio, that rely on lethal injection use the same doses of the deadly three-chemical cocktail for all prisoners, regardless of size and weight.

Filiaggi waived legal appeals to hasten his execution, but changed hismind late last week, touching off a furious 96-hour legal fight. His attorneys fought and lost on several fronts yesterday. First, the Ohio Supreme Court voted 5-2 against his request to stop the execution. The U.S. District Court later turned down Filiaggi's motion to be allowed to join other condemned men in a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of lethal injection.

A three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals also turned down his appeal last night. Jeff Gamso, Filiaggi's attorney, argued that lethal injection would, in effect, mean his client was "tortured to death."

State officials say the process is reliable and legal.

However, 11 of 37 states have either put lethal injection on hold or are studying its usage.

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USA. LETHAL INJECTION, REVEALED


April 29, 2007: the Boston Globe Newspaper published an editorial in which it criticised the methods of execution and called for the abolition of the death penalty. The following is an extract:

"Though nearly all industrial democracies have abolished the death penalty, it survives in the United States. The era of public hangings is long over, replaced by an impersonal, well-guarded process that minimizes discomfort for the executioners and the public. But this decades-long effort to make executions seem merely clinical- culminating in the rise of lethal injection as the dominant method of execution-- does not mean that prisoners are being put to death in a humane manner.

An analysis of executions in California and North Carolina published in PLoS Medicine indicates that the three-drug combination generally used in lethal injections can result in a painful process of asphyxiation, during which a prisoner may be conscious.

That possibility is heightened when technicians bungle the procedure. The study strips away the medical veneer and offers strong evidence that lethal injection violates the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

Methods capable of causing near-instantaneous deaths, such as guillotines and firing squads, have been rejected as stomach-turning.

The electric chair, a method conceived as a quick, mechanical alternative, has proved repulsive in practice, and the brutality of lethal injection is becoming ever clearer, too.

The debate over the death penalty in America should not hinge on whether the final agonies caused by any particular execution method are unconstitutionally painful.

There are many other reasons why the death penalty should be abolished:

It does not deter crime; it is applied unevenly across jurisdictions and demographic groups; it is irrevocable, and the dozen-odd death row inmates exonerated by DNA evidence underscore the danger of executing the innocent. But broader support for capital punishment surely relies on the perception that prisoners go to their deaths painlessly.

This latest study tells states not to kid themselves; taking lives in the public's name can never be rendered quick or clean.”

For further information :
www.medicalnewstoday.com/healthnews.php?newsid=68867