Cruel and Unusual by Clive Stafford Smith

This judgment came despite ample evidence that the cocktail of
drugs used to kill people can cause great suffering. As Justice Ruth
Bader Ginsburg, dissenting from the ruling, wrote, "it is undisputed that
the second and third drugs used in Kentucky's three-drug lethal
injection protocol, pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride, would cause a
conscious inmate to suffer excruciating pain". Because the pancuronium
bromide simply paralyses him, a condemned prisoner cannot "scream after
the second drug is injected, no matter how much pain he is
experiencing".

Criticisms by the dissenting justices are buttressed by the British
veterinarians' decision four decades ago, joined more recently by their
American counterparts, to ban the use of similar drugs when putting down
a dog. Indeed, Justice Stevens wondered whether society could really
allow a state to kill its prisoners "using a drug that it would not
permit to be used on pets."

Unfortunately, other justices felt that the pancuronium bromide was
justifiable to preserve "the dignity of the procedure"  It is, in
other words, an Ostrich drug, used to prevent witnesses from seeing the
victim's suffering. This somehow delivers a "dignified" death and allows
those who run the system to stick their heads in the sand once again.

All this tinkering with the mechanism of death finally persuaded
Justice John Stevens, an octogenarian who has wrestled with the issue for
decades, to give up on the death penalty altogether. He stated that "the
imposition of the death penalty represents the pointless and needless
extinction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernible
social or public purposes. A penalty with such negligible returns to the
state [is] patently excessive and cruel and unusual punishment
violative of the eighth amendment"

Yet, with states competing to reschedule executions, Stevens' belated
and isolated conversion will be of little solace to the 3,263 prisoners
who now face death at the hands of the authorities once again.

Clive Stafford Smith is the founder of Reprieve and has spent 25 years
working on behalf of defendants facing the death penalty in the USA.

© Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/04/18/8383/

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