A Disastrous Performance Necessary to Revise Death Penalty in U.S.

That a person sentenced to death dies of a massive heart attack, strapped to the gurney where he tried to end his life, after his execution be suspended because ” something does not work,” as he noted his executioners – opened a new front in the legal battle for several years surrounding executions in the United States. Clayton Lockett lived for 43 minutes after injecting the first drug of the three that make up the protocol to end someone’s life by lethal injection. Barack Obama yesterday brought the view of the White House and qualified Lockett execution of ” inhuman “.

According to witnesses at the penitentiary in McAlester (Oklahoma), Lockett suffered brutal seizure and writhed on the couch while trying to free himself from the bonds. In his struggle with the tightened jaw, the inmate managed to pronounce several words indicating that something was not as it should. “It was a time of great chaos,” said Dean Sanderford, one of the lawyers of the accused, to the local press. The doctor overseeing the execution saw on the screen that controls the heart beat one of the three lines, each corresponding to one of the three drugs that are injected, had become very erratic and that the prisoner’s vein had exploited.

That’s when prison officials decided to close the curtains covering the glass that separates the living room where the executions of the family of the offender, the victim, the lawyers and the press are. The only information that exists from the time that the execution is stopped and the prisoner died on the table about ten minutes later of a massive heart attack, according to Robert Patton, director of the Oklahoma Department of Corrections. The State Governor, Republican Mary Fallin issued a statement in which he claimed that ” Lockett was knocked unconscious after he administered the respective drugs.”

The grotesque execution and doubts about what happened made the state canceled another sentence scheduled to be carried out hours later and postponed at least for 14 days, according to Patton. “It was torture,” she managed to say Lockett ‘s attorney. Adam Leathers, co-chair of the Oklahoma Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, accused the state of being ” tortured a man with an evil experiment unconstitutional.”

If failed drugs or procedure itself may be known in the coming days but for now it is back on the table for discussion and pressure from groups opposed to the death penalty is an archaic system of brutality that makes U.S. the only Western country that keeps its law the penalty. Along with Saudi Arabia, China, Iran and Yemen, the U.S. is one of the countries most people subjected to the maximum penalty each year.

The American public rejects the death penalty as never before in the last 40 years. Its probably unconstitutional for violating the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, may one day return the issue to the Supreme Court reinstated it in 1976 after being suspended for a while.

In recent years, the death penalty has been something that was never contemplated when Dr. Jay Chapman, a forensic – precisely – Oklahoma, invented the lethal injection, as it considered that killing animals ” more humanity than the people. ” A Chapman repelled him the electric chair and the gas chamber and in a perverse act of evolution invented the famous cocktail of three drugs. What could not calculate is that his method would suffer a major setback for something as basic as the shortage of one or more components.

In the fall of 2010, U.S. prisons were without sodium pentothal, the anesthetic that was used in capital punishment for the accused sleep before injecting into a vein the other two substances that destroy their lives (pancuronium bromide, which paralyzes all muscles except the heart – and short – breathing, and potassium chloride, which stops the heart, causing, and yes, death). Pharmaceutical logistics problems then claimed not to sell to correctional anesthesia but as a backdrop was their intention to no longer be part of the ancestral practice of the death penalty.

Since then, the 32 states that still maintain their criminal codes in the death penalty in the U.S. have experienced new drugs with living humans, with tragic results in most cases, which led to halt executions in several states, as is the case now Ohlahoma but it was before California, Kentucky or Arizona. On the evening of Tuesday, Oklahoma for the first time used in the execution of a convicted drug called midazolam, a sedative which is sold under the trade name Versed and benzodiazepine is supposedly the world’s fastest effect.

So far, this drug is used only to reassure a patient during a procedure of no importance, since this remains awake. As stated in the National Library of Medicine, located on the premises of the National Institute of Health in Bethesda (Maryland), midazolam can “seriously threaten health by causing respiratory problems.”

“The role of the first drug injected is crucial,” said Richard Dieter, the Information Center for the Death Penalty, a group that monitors the implementation of the penalty. “If this does not work, the effect of two fluids that are applied can cause excruciating pain,” concludes Dieter.

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Posted by Jamshed Sindhu on May 5 2014. Filed under USA, World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.