Lethal injection
As execution by lethal injection or lethal injection refers to a form of execution of the death penalty , in which the condemned a deadly poison or medicines in lethal dose is injected. It has been used increasingly since the 1980s and is intended to replace the electric chair , the gallows , the shooting , the gas chamber and other methods as a humane form of execution . It was first introduced and mainly used in the United States .
Procedure in the USA
The person to be executed is fixed on a couch and receives an indwelling venous cannula in both arms . Only one of these is needed to carry out the execution; the other serves as a replacement in the event that the first cannula should become unusable.
The drugs administered have the following effects one after the other: At the beginning, a rapid loss of consciousness is triggered and then death by paralysis of the respiratory muscles , followed by a depolarization of the heart muscle . The barbiturate thiopental is used for the narcotic effect, pancuronium bromide , suxamethonium chloride or tubocurarine chloride as a muscle relaxant and potassium chloride as a heart paralyzing agent. Death usually occurs within five minutes, but the total procedure can take up to three-quarters of an hour. The individual active ingredients are not already mixed outside of the body, as this could lead to the precipitation of poorly or insoluble substances, but are injected one after the other.
The fatal injection thus takes place in three steps:
- The convict is anesthetized, with the dose of the anesthetic being set so high that it alone could be fatal.
- All muscles except the heart become paralyzed, suffocation begins.
- The heart stops beating, the person dies.
The cannula supply lines lead through the wall to an adjoining room, from which at least two prison officers each press a button, one of which initiates the execution. This should avoid concrete feelings of guilt on the part of the prison officers concerned. The injections themselves are now administered under computer control. Between each injection, the cannula is rinsed with an isotonic saline solution so that undesired precipitation reactions in the cannula do not occur later . A doctor is always present to determine the death of the condemned after the execution.
Painfulness
The question arises again and again whether killing with lethal injection is actually painless. The anesthetic thiopental works very quickly, but only for a relatively short time (5–15 minutes), which is why there is a risk that the convicted person could regain consciousness and suffocate in agony due to the effects of the subsequent drug (muscle relaxant). For these reasons, veterinarians use long-acting barbiturates when euthanizing animals .
Often there are also technical complications: For example, the introduction of the needles can cause difficulties, and in some cases suitable veins could only be made accessible after a full hour. If the venous cannulas are inserted by medical laypersons, misalignments are common. If the injection is not intravenous but subcutaneously , the hypnotic (e.g. thiopental) does not work properly because of its slow and incomplete absorption from the subcutaneous tissue, while the muscle relaxant is quite effective because it is absorbed relatively well and quickly. In the worst case, the delinquent suffocates from paralysis of the respiratory muscles while fully conscious. In the beginning, the injection tube and needle were not rinsed with isotonic saline solution between the doses of the individual drug solutions . By precipitation , which occurred together by the encounter of the individual drugs, the tube was impermeable and the execution had to be interrupted.
application
Lethal injection in the USA
In February 1977 in the United States, Stanley Deutsch, anesthetist from the University of Oklahoma, took up the idea of drug execution and suggested the drug combination described. Charlie Brooks was the first delinquent to be executed using the new method on December 7, 1982 in Texas. Lethal injection is now the main method of execution in 32 out of 50 states. Some time after it was first used, the process also found acceptance outside the United States. China introduced it in 1997, Guatemala in 1998, the Philippines in 1999 and Thailand in 2003. Other states have now made lethal injection legal, but have not adopted it in practice.
On June 12, 2006, the United States Supreme Court ruled that those sentenced to death could sue US states' execution records if they were an unusual and cruel punishment in violation of the 8th Amendment . In Missouri and South Dakota , inmates obtained court access to cessation of lethal injections. Against this, lawsuits in Florida , Kentucky and Texas were denied. In the states of Florida and California , lethal injection execution was suspended on December 15, 2006 after a Florida convict struggled with death for over 30 minutes and died excruciatingly and (happened on the same day) a California federal court overlooked the method over doubts Constitutional conformity prohibited for the time being.
In the case of Baze v. On April 16, 2008 , the Supreme Court of the United States issued a landmark judgment on Rees , declaring execution by lethal injection to be fundamentally legal. The method of execution is not a "cruel and unusual punishment" and therefore does not violate the eighth amendment to the American Constitution , as the plaintiffs, two death row inmates from Kentucky, had argued.
Immediately after the verdict was announced, the governor of Virginia lifted a moratorium on executions that had been in place since the fall. No one had been executed in the United States for more than six months; The states had wanted to await the judgment of the Supreme Court before the further execution of the death penalty . The verdict was passed with a clear majority of seven to two votes. Previously, statements by the highest judges had indicated a split opinion at the Supreme Court. Judge David Souter indicated that lower courts might be asked to look for painless alternatives. That would mean that executions would be suspended for years. While the conservative judge Antonin Scalia asked why the "least painful method" should be chosen to execute a murderer, the liberal judge John Paul Stevens said he was "terribly concerned" that lethal injection was "excruciating pain" could trigger.
The manufacturer and sole supplier to US penal institutions of Thiopental , the company Hospira , had delivery bottlenecks in 2010 and stopped the production and sale of thiopental in January 2011, so that executions with lethal injection in nine states had to be temporarily suspended or postponed . In December 2011, an EU- wide uniform export license requirement for thiopental and all other short and medium-term barbiturates came into force, since then exports from the EU have only been possible with a special permit.
In January 2014, midazolam was first administered in combination with hydromorphone in the US state of Ohio as an execution poison instead of the otherwise used pentobarbital .
Recent publications also discuss the legality and moral aspects of the medical profession's involvement in lethal injection execution. An ethical guideline from the American Medical Association prohibits physicians from actively participating, for example by providing venous access .
In May 2016, the pharmaceutical company Pfizer announced as the last of 25 pharmaceutical companies whose substances are used as poisons for the death penalty in the United States to stop selling for this purpose.
Lethal injection in the People's Republic of China
Since 1997, executions have been carried out in China using a combination of various active ingredients that has been kept secret. The deadly substances are administered with a single syringe instead of an infusion, as is common in the United States. The allegedly painless death is said to occur between 30 and 60 seconds after the injection. The Kunming People's Court was in charge of developing this method of execution .
No further details have been obtained about this method of execution since such information is subject to state secrecy in China. This new painless lethal injection is criticized by parts of the judiciary as "too easy a death" for criminals. Amnesty International fears that the number of executions will continue to rise in connection with the new mobile execution buses used by the Chinese express courts .
Application in National Socialism
In its current form, as described above, execution by lethal injection has only been in use in the USA since the 1980s. The basic idea of lethal injection is, however, older. In Germany it was suggested by Karl Brandt for use in the euthanasia program of the National Socialists, where it was used - among other methods. In addition, members of the SS killed sick prisoners and those sentenced to death in the Auschwitz concentration camp by injecting phenol and other poisons directly into the heart muscle. In the Buchenwald concentration camp , too , large numbers of prisoners were killed with similar injections in the so-called “bunker”, the detention area of the camp, and also in the Mauthausen concentration camp . A prominent victim was the former leader of the SPD parliamentary group in the Reichstag , Ernst Heilmann , who was killed on April 3, 1940 by SS-Hauptscharführer Martin Sommer in Buchenwald with a poison injection.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ JURIST: Supreme Court allows death row lethal injection challenge to proceed , June 12, 2006
- ↑ LEGAL: Kentucky Supreme Court upholds lethal injection protocol , November 23, 2006
- ↑ Uwe Schmitt: The lethal injection was followed by 34 minutes of agony. In: welt.de. December 18, 2020, accessed June 7, 2020 .
- ↑ a b sueddeutsche.de of April 16, 2008
- ↑ USA: inmate executed by lethal injection after attempting suicide. In: Spiegel Online . September 28, 2010, accessed June 9, 2018 .
- ↑ G. Bohsem: EU restricts delivery of lethal injection substance. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . December 11, 2011, accessed December 12, 2011 .
- ↑ No poison for US lethal injections: Germany says no. In: Doctors newspaper online. January 24, 2011, accessed December 12, 2011 .
- ^ Ohio execution: New drug protocol, but 15 minutes to die in Los Angeles Times (January 16, 2014)
- ^ Sawicki NN: Clinicians' involvement in capital punishment - constitutional implications. , N Engl J Med. 2014 Jul 10; 371 (2): 103-5, PMID 24869595
- ^ Truog RD, Cohen IG, Rockoff MA: Physicians, medical ethics, and execution by lethal injection. , JAMA. 2014 Jun 18; 311 (23): 2375-6, PMID 24842282
- ^ American Medical Association: Opinion 2.06 - Capital Punishment , accessed September 16, 2014
- ↑ Süddeutsche Zeitung online: Pfizer prohibits the use of its substances for executions , accessed on May 14, 2016
- ^ Die SS-Ärzte ( Memento from September 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Report from the Mauthausen concentration camp