Why does it take so long to execute someone on death row?
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Part of it is to give time for them to be exonerated, as often happens, or to prove through behavior in prison that they are not a threat to society. The prisoners attorney will draw out the process as much as possible with appeals or mistrials or re-sentencing. If they’re gonna die, you might as well exhaust every single other option first.
Part of it is because it’s actually very difficult for most states to get the drugs used in lethal injection, and lethal injection is the only method most states will use, despite being the least humane way to do it.
The companies producing these drugs will often not sell them to prisons or state agencies on the basis that the people administering the drugs are NOT healthcare professionals, they are cops, and even if a doctor was involved the drugs are not humane (the drug that stops the prisoner from reacting violently to the ones that kill them is a muscle paralytic, they still feel everything, they just can’t speak or react physically)
If you’re going to do something irreversible like executing someone, you want to be assured that you’ve got the right guy. You really don’t want to execute the wrong person (and it still happens).
So there’s an automatic appeals that every person sentenced to death gets and additional appeals on top of that if they have a decent lawyer. All of these take time in court and courts move glacially slow.
This all adds up to a lot of time waiting to make sure you have the right person.
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