antonborisov

Нашел статью в The New York Times.

Terminally ill people who want to die can take drugs to end their lives peacefully. Ailing pets are put down humanely every day. Clearly, the technology exists to bring about a quick and painless death.

Why, then, do executions by lethal injection sometimes become troubling spectacles? The death in Oklahoma on Tuesday of Clayton D. Lockett, amid struggling and apparent pain, was not the country’s first bungled execution.

A number of factors have conspired to produce painful scenes in the death chamber, experts say: an ill-conceived drug formulation clung to by many states; the lack of medical expertise among people planning and carrying out executions; and, more recently, drug shortages that have pushed prison officials to improvise lethal cocktails and buy drugs from loosely regulated compounding pharmacies.

According to prison officials in Oklahoma, an intravenous line inserted into Mr. Lockett’s groin did not work properly and interfered with the flow of drugs. But doctors say the drugs themselves, three used in a certain sequence, are a deeper part of the problem, because two of them cause suffering if they are administered improperly. And those two drugs are not necessary.

Physicians have long known that large doses of single drugs — certain sedatives or anesthetics — can take a life painlessly, and with far less distress than the three-drug cocktail causes if the injection is botched.

Since 2010, more death-penalty states — Oklahoma not among them — have moved to use single drugs for lethal injection. Even critics of the death penalty say most of those executions have gone more smoothly than ones involving multiple drugs.

Barbiturates, including sodium thiopental and pentobarbital, infused into the bloodstream can quickly make a person go deeply unconscious, stop breathing and die. Dr. Mark J. Heath, an anesthesiologist at Columbia University and an expert on lethal injection, said that high doses of pentobarbital were routinely used to euthanize animals, from pet rabbits to beached whales.

Barbiturates alone have been used in 71 executions, in Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Missouri, Ohio, South Dakota, Texas and Washington, said Jennifer Moreno, a lawyer with the Death Penalty Clinic at Berkeley Law School.

Even though Dr. Heath opposes lethal injection, he said, “I have not seen a single complaint, not an unhappy warden or family or anybody, from the single-drug barbiturate approach.”

But he said that switching to a single drug would not fix all the problems with lethal injection because intravenous lines would still be needed. Starting them can be difficult and requires medical skill.

The three-drug combination used on Mr. Lockett was modeled on a plan first developed in Oklahoma in 1977 by Dr. Jay Chapman, then the state’s chief medical examiner. State lawmakers had asked him if there was a more humane way to execute people than methods like electrocution and the firing squad.

Dr. Chapman proposed a large dose of a barbiturate, sodium thiopental, followed by two other drugs: one to cause paralysis and halt breathing, and the other, potassium chloride, to stop the heart. His recipe was adopted by nearly every death-penalty state.