What do they follow protocols like alcohol swabs and sterile needles when performing a lethal injection? The subject is about to die.
In: Biology
Well, “about to die” doesn’t mean “you can torture them”. Often things are called off and some of the time procedures don’t work. If the person isn’t dead, and you hurt them with some infection, that’s wrong.
Up until the moment the deadly chemicals are pumped in, there are plenty of reasons to stop an execution. Maybe there’s a last-minute call from the governor. Maybe there’s a problem with one of the drugs and the execution has to be postponed. If they treat the condemned prisoner with non-sterile protocols, they’ve just subjected them to cruel and unusual punishment by denying them proper medical care. And if the condemned winds up with an infection before their next execution date, they’ve got damages against the state while in their care; that’s a big deal.
Arguably, even if the execution goes as planned, doing a medical procedure with lax standards is *already* denying them proper care. I’m no fan of the death penalty, and lethal injection has been shown to have its share of problems in practice. But if we’re going to do it, doing it by the book with proper sanitary procedures certainly causes the least risk of legal issues for the prison, at a minimum. And that’s to say nothing of the ethical side of “give everyone proper medical care until they’re declared dead,” as a rule.
For one it’s a humane practice. If something goes wrong with the execution you don’t want the person suffering from a horrible infection etc. There’s many reasons why an execution might be stopped at the last moment and giving someone a disease or infection could be considered torture under those circumstances.
The US has a constitutional protection against cruel and unusual punishments and while you might argue about the merits of capital punishment or even the prison system itself, using dirty needles or causing unnecessary harm and injury during an execution would be considered cruel by the courts.
The simple answer though is the needles and medical equipment are sterilized at manufacturing and it would cost more to create specialized non-sterile equipment for that purpose.
I also see it as a sign of respect for the process and the gravity of the situation.
We are injecting you with death, but we are going to respect your life for as long as possible.
While acknowledging that we need to use the death penalty, I feel it is a failure of society that we need to use it. We should be trying to figure out ways to not need to kill people. Just putting them into prison for life is not an acceptable solution. We can do better. Corporal punishment is about deterrence and justice, but what if we can prevent the crimes in other ways. Ways like better social programs.
Theatrics—same reason they use lethal injection in the first place instead of shooting them in the head repeatedly even though lethal injection has a much higher failure rate and is considerably more painful. They wrap the ending of a human life (which, even if you think is justified, is fundamentally an act of state violence) in a package that makes it seem like a medical procedure, which it is not. The alcohol swab is there for the same reason one of the chemicals in the cocktail of poisons (pancuronium bromide) is a paralytic that does not significantly hasten death or reduce pain in any way but makes the subject unable to thrash around or scream—to make the whole thing look as clean and tidy as possible.
I should make two things very clear too. I reiterate—just because something is made to look like a medical procedure does not mean it is a medical procedure. Execution is not a medical procedure no matter how well it’s dressed up to look like one—it is as clear a violation of the Hippocratic Oath as there ever was. The American Medical Association’s code of medical ethics specifically bars any member physician from participating in any way in a legally-authorized execution. The execution staff is not made up of physicians but mostly of prison staff. The people physically administering the execution are sometimes phlebotomists, sometimes EMTs or paramedics, sometimes former military members with field medicine experience, but they are NOT doctors, and they are not administering a medical procedure, they are killing a person. Secondly, lethal injection in the United States should not be compared to euthanasia of pets. Euthanasia IS done by a trained medical professional with the express intent of being painless. The drug cocktail used for pet euthanasia, phenytoin/pentobarbital, is totally different than the drugs used for execution, and do work very well.
I’m a former open heart surgery Respiratory Therapist and cared for a former death row inmate who had a cardiac arrest while on death row. He was resuscitated by the guards, taken to the hospital and found to have several blocked vessels in his heart. He subsequently had bypass surgery and lived.
He survived several more years until his sentence was carried out and he was executed.
Not sure if this is accurate, but someone once told me, “Suppose the prisoner was truly not guilty. Archeologists will want to document an incorrect state murder, not be confused by weird bacteria decomposing the body like they got stuck with a shiv.”
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