After the botched execution in Oklahoma, Room For Debate wrestles with question. Neil J. Farber examines opinion within the medical community:
In the survey in 2000, 1,000 physicians in the United States were asked whether they condoned colleagues’ involvement in capital punishment. Of the 482 physicians who returned questionnaires, 80 percent said they believed at least one of the proscribed actions by the American Medical Association and the American College of Physicans (starting IV lines, monitoring vital signs, selecting injection sites, administering the lethal drugs, determining death, maintaining lethal injection devices, supervising personnel who give the lethal injections, and ordering the lethal drugs) was actually permitted, and 53 percent said 5 or more of the actions were acceptable. Those who approved of the death penalty were more likely to approve doctors’ involvement with several actions.
Sidney Wolfe makes the standard case against doctors administering lethal injection drugs:
[G]roups like the American Medical Association oppose participation and anesthesiologists can lose board certification for taking part in executions. Involvement perverts the duties and responsibilities that physicians have to heal, not to hurt. Administering a lethal dose of drugs is the most serious violation of ethics, but merely being present to pronounce a patient dead still makes that physician complicit in someone’s killing, as a necessary part of the death squad.
Ken Baum and Julie Cantor share a different perspective:
Physician involvement in lethal injection can make capital punishment less grotesque, more palatable, and even routine. But so long as the state uses the tools of the physician to kill its citizens, those who wish to step in to ensure that executions are, at the very least, competently handled should have the option to do so. Anything else is death penalty politics at the expense of the condemned. And no matter where you come out on capital punishment, no one should be sentenced to a botched execution.
The Dish 