Lethal Injection is Not Humane

The New York Times reports on the growing scrutiny of the use of lethal injections to execute prisoners:

Judges in several states have started to put up potentially insurmountable roadblocks to the use of lethal injections to execute condemned inmates.

Their decisions are based on new evidence suggesting that prisoners have endured agonizing executions. In response, judges are insisting that doctors take an active role in supervising executions, even though the American Medical Association's code of ethics prohibits that.

...

"When prisoners first started making these challenges," Ms. Fellner said, "the courts gave them short shrift. They thought these were stalling tactics. And there was not a lot of evidence."

The recent decisions, by contrast, rely on accounts of witnesses, post-mortem blood testing and execution logs that seem to show that executions meant to be humane have, in fact, caused excruciating pain.

There is no such thing as a humane execution, and a country that really cares about human rights doesn't execute anyone.