by Phil Clarke
Another potential problem inherent in executing a prisoner by lethal injection is the difficulty in finding a suitable vein in which to insert the necessary drips or cannulae. Many of the men and women who find themselves on death row have been previous intravenous drug users, and as a result have damaged or weakened the veins needed for the needle-based execution. Such a problem was faced by the executioners of serial killer Stephen Peter Morin on 13 March 1985. Due to a previous heavy drug habit, it took forty torturous minutes for them to find a suitable vein – they even resorting to looking in his leg. A year later, when a similar anxious search took place, the technicians received assistance from the prisoner himself – Randy Woolls – who kindly found a usable vein for them!
It took several officials almost an hour to attach drips to the arms of Rickey Ray Rector in Arkansas on 24 January 1992. The curtain to the witness room was drawn and yet witnesses later reported audible sounds of suffering. The technicians were about to resort to using a knife on the condemned’s arm to reveal an available vein until one was finally found in his right hand. Even this unbearable experience was surpassed when, on 2 May 2006, it took almost an hour and a half to execute Joseph Lewis Clark. The prisoner, who had murdered twenty-two-year-old David Manning during a robbery at a Toledo gas station, only had one usable vein, thanks to a life of drug addiction, and had to forego the back-up intravenous line. The convict was used to authorities taking their time as he had been waiting on death row for more than twenty-one years! When the time eventually came, he exhibited many signs of pain and suffering. He struggled with prison officials before the director of Ohio’s Department for the Rehabilitation and Correction, Terry Collins, chose to close the curtains to the witness area. The spectators reported that Clark raised his head from the gurney to which he was strapped and moaned, ‘. . . don’t work . . . don’t work’ – surely the clearest indication yet received that the process is flawed. As recently as 24 May 2007, an execution by lethal injection went well over time due to missing veins, but this was down to something other than drug abuse. Christopher Newton, a thirty-seven-year-old criminal who was convicted of the aggravated murder of a cellmate, weighed a whopping 120 kilograms (19 stone). This made it almost impossible for the team of technicians at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility to locate a vein. Ten attempts and two hours later they finally managed to complete the intravenous insertion and finish the job, though not before allowing poor Newton an unofficial and fleeting stay of execution: the ordeal took so long they afforded him a toilet break!
Poor dosage levels and ruined or remote veins have not been the sole cause of error. On 3 May 1995 in Missouri, Emmitt Foster suffered during his execution due to a much simpler mistake. When the first of the three drugs was injected into the convict’s bloodstream, Foster failed to fall into the pentothal-induced deep sleep but instead began to gasp for air and convulse upon the gurney. Immediately, the curtains were drawn to hide any further signs of pain and anguish from the observers, and it would be a further half hour until the curtains were opened to reveal a corpse for them to officially witness. But what had transpired behind those closed curtains? Why had Foster failed to respond to the anaesthetic properties of the initial drug? It transpires that the error did not lie with the levels of the sodium thiopental, or with its timing but with the bindings used to restrain the prisoner to his gurney. The leather straps had been secured so tightly upon Foster that it had restricted the flow of the sedating serum, limiting its effect upon the body. The reason for the slow action of the drug was spotted by the attending coroner, William Gum.
Another example of incompetent execution took place on 13 December 2006, when convicted killer Angel Nieves Diaz failed to succumb to the initial dose of anaesthetic even after more than thirty minutes. The execution technicians decided to inject a second dose of sodium thiopental into the fifty-five- year-old man’s bloodstream but this brought no coma-like state. Instead, witnesses present at the event reported seeing the Florida prisoner pull grotesque faces for up to twenty-four minutes after the injections began. Yet despite such first-hand accounts the prison officials said Diaz felt no pain during his execution and put his unusual reaction to the double dose down to a liver disease. This conflicted with the findings of the medical examiner, Doctor William Hamilton, who during the autopsy found his liver to be in normal working order. What he did find were chemical burns on both arms, which he judged to be evidence of poorly inserted drips. The needles from each intravenous drip had penetrated the desired veins but had gone through the other side and into his flesh. As a result of such malpractice, the final fix had been administered into the soft tissue rather than into the bloodstream. This severely reduced the effects of the sodium thiopental. Two days after these findings, Governor Jeb Bush suspended all executions in Florida and appointed a commission to look into the constitutionality of the technique. This state moratorium has since come to an end thanks to Bush’s successor, Charlie Crist, who lifted the ban to sign the death warrant for Mark Dean Schwab on 18 July 2007.
The use of lethal injection as a death penalty in the United States is far from black and white. The country is far from united when it comes to this method of execution, with courts finding it unconstitutional in Missouri, California, Florida and Tennessee, while Arizona and Oklahoma have had their rights to the judicial jab upheld. Not all the detractors of the lethal injection are opponents of the death penalty. There are many who believe that the method is too merciful, and offering such a pain-free technique removes the deterrent.
While the United States continues to be the main user or, possibly, abuser of the procedure, it is not the only country that offers the injurious injection as a means to an untimely end. Taiwan was the first country outside the United States to allow the lethal injection to be used, but has yet to actively take a life using this method. The first non-American land to ‘shoot up’ their capital convicts was China, and this began in 1997, some fifteen years after the first US death by lethal injection. Since then, Guatemala and the Philippines have both followed suit, debuting their noxious needles in February 1998 and 1999 respectively. Thailand joined the list with a multiple execution in December 2003, when four men were sentenced to death for drug trafficking and murder.
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