OHIO MOVES TO LEGITIMIZE THE DEATH PENALTY
Categories: Essays
Written By: Billy Sinclair
It was announced recently that the State of Ohio has abandoned the three-drug cocktail used by 35 other states to execute condemned inmates and will now use one powerful drug to execute its condemned inmates—a method similar to the one being used by vets to euthanize animals. The single drug, which is a powerful anesthetic known as thiopental sodium and is currently used in the three-drug cocktail, will be administered intravenously because medical experts say this is the quickest way to induce death. Ohio prison officials will also have a “backup procedure” in the event death is not produced quickly or the inmate experiences obvious pain. The backup procedure allows for two large doses of powerful pain killers—Diludid (a drug of choice by many addicts in the late 1960s) and midalzolam (often used in dental extractions and in pre-surgical sedation—to be administered in the muscles of the upper arm, thighs, or buttocks.
Surprisingly, some death penalty opponents hailed Ohio’s new execution procedure as a great leap forward in executing people. For example, Ty Alper, associate director of the Death Penalty Clinic at the University of California, Berkeley, told the New York Times that the change is “a significant step forward. The hope is that other states will realize that there is no need to paralyze inmates before executing them and that, in fact, doing so risks a horribly torturous execution.”
But Richard Dieter, director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C., was more skeptical. “The simple fact is that no one knows whether this method will work on humans,” he told the New York Times, “and what unforeseen side effects there could be to using the drug this way.”
Some legal scholars told the Times that this new execution procedure would prove to be a mixed blessing. “This is a victory for those who complained particularly about the three-drug protocol,” Ohio State University law professor Douglas A. Berman told the newspaper. “However, death penalty opponents may find it even harder to complain about execution procedures if courts endorse this new approach and if Ohio is able to conduct executions without incident using this new protocol.”
The new procedure will be finalized on November 30 and Ohio officials are hoping it will be enough to convince a federal district court to lift stays of executions currently pending in several cases. Ohio officials would like to try the new procedure out on Kenneth Biros who is scheduled for execution on December 8 but whose case is one of those under a temporary stay. Ohio Corrections Director Terry Collins told the media that “if the stay was lifted, we would move forward.”
If the Ohio’s single drug execution method proves successful (in other words, it produces a quick and peaceful death) either in the Biros case or some other, death penalty opponents will have lost a major component of their “cruel and unusual” punishment argument. The nation’s 35 three-drug cocktail states will quickly modify their execution protocol and adopt the one-drug method so they can remove the controversy associated with the three-drug cocktail.
It’s really a proverbial Catch 22 situation: by beating the three-drug cocktail to death, death penalty opponents have given death penalty states an opportunity to perfect the ideal execution method. The winds in the sails of the anti-death penalty movement may soon die out to the point that the movement will simply drift about aimlessly. The only hope on the horizon is that DNA evidence will ultimately prove that an innocent condemned person has been executed.
