Doctor shares sick way you die ‘8 out of 10 times’ during injection execution
As four death row inmates in the US face potential executions by the electric chair and firing squad, one doctor has warned that the lethal injection is not such a calm way to go as it seems.
The four inmates on death row in South Carolina have run out of appeals, with their lawyers arguing to the state's Supreme Court on Tuesday that the old electric chair and new firing squad constitute cruel and unusual punishments. They argued that a 2023 law which was brought in to allow the reintroduction of lethal injections in the state keeps too many details about the new drug and protocol used for the executions secret.
Despite there being no formal moratorium, South Carolina hasn't carried out an execution in almost 13 years after the drugs it used for the lethal injections expired and companies refused to sell prison officials more unless they could keep their identities hidden from the public. South Carolina's current execution law requires inmates to be sent to the electric chair unless they choose a different method.
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The state says lethal injections, the electric chair and the firing squad all fit existing protocols for carrying out executions. Dr Joel Zivot, clinician and associate professor of anesthesiology and surgery at Emory University School of Medicine spoke to The Mirror about the South Carolina cases and shared some truly disturbing details about what death by lethal injection is actually like.
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"The courts say that since execution is constitutional, a method must be available to carry it out," said Dr Zivot. "And because the court has decided that execution is constitutional, then it invites all sorts of methods that can come forward knowing that the court will support them."
The chair, the bullet, or the injection
During a hearing for the four men, justices questioned both sides, emphasising whether the firing squad should be considered a banned unusual punishment because it has only been sued three times in the last 50 years - all in Utah. They also questioned the electric conductivity of the human skull and asked if modern science found the electric chair to be more painful and cruel than a century ago.
They also got a lawyer for the inmates to say if the Supreme Court bans electrocution and the firing squad and the state can prove drugs used for lethal injections are the right potency and purity and the method matches what other states and the federal government use, then they don't have a basis to stop an execution. Attorney John Blume said: "I want to make sure it is [as] humane as possible."
Dr Zivot explained: "The court also has said that no method of execution is inherently cruel - this conservative court certainly seems to feel that way. And so in that way, the court has decided it 'owns' the meaning of the word cruel.
South Carolina's electric chair dates bath to 1912 (Getty Images)"They've also created something that they call the 'normal pain of dying'. And so they say that execution doesn't have to be painless. That to be killed can have some degree of pain. Now, how much pain and what that means, of course, is highly problematic.
"None of the execution methods have ever been found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. The reason why methods come and go is because the public doesn't like them, or the states can't do them. It's not because they're stopped by the law."
During Tuesday's hearing, Circuit Judge Jocelyn Newman sided with inmates whose experts testified prisoners would feel terrible pain whether their bodies were "cooking" with 2,000 volts of electricity in the chair, built in 1912, or if their hearts were stopped by bullets - assuming the three shooters were on target - from the yet-to-be-used firing squad.
Lethal injection back on the execution table
Back in September, prison officials announced a change to their planned lethal injection method. They said they now have the sedative pentobarbital and changed the method of lethal injection execution from using three drugs to just one. They did not share many other details apart from saying South Carolina's method is similar to the protocol followed by the federal government and six other states.
Attorneys argued that South Carolina's shield law which allows it to keep details of lethal injection execution hidden is more secretive than any other state. They argued prison officials should not be allowed to hide the identities of drug companies, the names of anyone helping with an execution and the exact procedure followed.
Lawyers for the prisoners said most states release at least some information about the potency, purity and stabilisation of lethal injection drugs. If the drugs are too weak, inmates may simply suffer without dying, but if they are too strong the drug molecules can form tiny clumps that would cause intense pain when injected, according to court papers.
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'Drowning in your own blood'
Dr Zivot explained more about the lethal injection process, saying: "The reason why lethal injection came is that the other methods are so visually disturbing. It's the visual aspect that alarms the public - no one cares seemingly about the experience of the prisoners as they die.
"Even though my own work has shown that lethal injection burns the lungs and causes this frothy fluid to accumulate in the lungs as a person dies and they drown in their own bloody secretions. So eight out of 10 times you are drowning in your own blood. It's not at all like it appears visually, which is that a person seems to close their eyes, cough and move and then they're dead.
Inmates in South Carolina face the electric chair after lethal injections were suspended (Getty Images)"So that's why lethal injection has kept on so long. And if it wasn't for the shortage of drugs, then I think it would persist. It's because there's been this effective campaign to curtail the use of pharmaceuticals, that the Europeans actually had a lot to do with, that the states that are really bound and determined to execute prisoners are not going back to old methods."
Prior to the unofficial moratorium, South Carolina used to carry out an average of three executions per year and had more than 60 inmates on death row when the last execution was carried out in 2011. Since then, successful appeals and deaths have lowered the number to 33.
In 2021, lawmakers allowed a firing squad to be added to the potential methods of execution. So far, there has been no legislation proposed in South Carolina to add nitrogen gas to the list of options, which was used to kill an inmate for the first time last month in Alabama.
'The places that wanna kill, they really wanna kill'
But, Dr Zivot warned of South Carolina's "secrecy". He said: "America loves its punishment. What can I say... In certain places, it's not everywhere. It's in very specific locations.
"The places that wanna kill, they really wanna kill, they really do. It's almost like some 'caricature of evil' that South Carolina needs to shroud what it does in secrecy. The secrecy part of this is so absurdly comically evil. Some kind of bizarre childish activity to say that we need to protect the privacy of the people we kill. What is that about?
"We are supposed to be an open society and justice is supposed to be seen to be done. How are you supposed to mount a proper defence when you can't even know what it is that you're being punished with? It's so antithetical to any kind of reasonable justice system. We want to know what the state has in mind because the state can't be trusted. They've not done anything to earn the public trust.
The firing squad was reintroduced in South Carolina in 2021 (Getty Images/iStockphoto)"The United States is not a signatory to the International Criminal Court and the Rome Statue. So there's no mechanism of taking, bringing them to court over charges of torture because they have not ratified the treaty and they've said that they don't consider it to be bound. And I think that's also disturbing."
Four inmates are suing in South Carolina, but four more have also run out of appeals, though two of them face a competency hearing before they could be executed, according to Justice 360, a group that describes itself as fighting for the inmates and for fairness and transparency in the death penalty and other major criminal cases. If the Supreme Court justices allow executions to resume and any additional appeals are unsuccessful, South Carolina's death chamber, last used in May 2011, could suddenly become quite busy.
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