Monday, April 23, 2007

Lovely

Here's one for the death, death, rah, rah, rah crowd:

The drugs used to execute prisoners in the United States sometimes fail to work as planned, causing slow and painful deaths that probably violate constitutional bans on cruel and unusual punishment, a new medical review of dozens of executions concludes.

Even when administered properly, the three-drug lethal injection method appears to have caused some inmates to suffocate while they were conscious and unable to move, instead of having their hearts stopped while they were sedated, scientists said in a report published Monday by the online journal PLoS Medicine.

The study concluded that the typical "one-size-fits-all" doses of anesthetic do not take into account an inmate's weight and other key factors. Some inmates got too little, and in some cases, the anesthetic wore off before the execution was complete, the authors found.

"You wouldn't be able to use this protocol to kill a pig at the University of Miami" without more proof that it worked as intended, said Teresa Zimmers, a biologist there who led the study.

The anesthetic part of lethal injections are "one-size-fits-all"?! There's something I never knew. Do the architects of these methods know anything about pharmacology? Even a little? More thought goes into the band of a baseball cap. Christ. Bloodthirsty people suck.