I wasn’t going to weigh in on this particular subject.  I figured that killing a person is killing a person.  It doesn’t make much difference how you do it.  Well, as long as we can rule out stoning, dragging behind a car, and some other nasty ways to go.

But, I think I’m beginning to come around on that. By striking down the three drug cocktail that California used, U.S. District Court Judge Jeremy Fogel has drawn the nation’s attention to the death penalty issue.  That alone would be sufficient to make it noteworthy.  We are the lone Western industrial nation to still carry out executions, yet there is a suprisingly small amount of public debate about the issue.

And now this is getting bigger, far bigger than I expected after the withdrawal of the anesthesiologists:

Fogel appropriately wants assurances that the state’s method of execution — lethal injection — does not constitute cruel and unusual punishment. The question is whether the three-drug “protocol” used in California and other states sufficiently eliminates pain during an inmate’s execution.

A widely distributed article appearing in the April 2005 issue of the British medical journal Lancet reported on a study by University of Miami researchers that indicated lethal injection may be more painful than the electric chair or the gas chamber. The study, which said inmates in a majority of cases received a lower level of anesthesia than is commonly used in surgery, has sparked widespread debate among medical professionals.

Morales was scheduled to die Tuesday. Fogel had ruled that the state should modify its execution procedure or delay carrying out the death-penalty sentence. The state responded to Fogel’s concerns by choosing one of his approved options: promising to have an anesthesiologist present to make certain that Morales was unconscious while he was being executed. At the 11th hour, anesthesiologists reasonably balked at being involved, fearing they were violating their profession’s ethical standards against doing harm. Their decision has since been backed by the American Medical Association and the California Medical Association.(San Jose Mercury News 2/23/06)

And it looks set to become bigger (on the flip)

California “is legitimately criticized for not doing enough homework on the protocol,” which calls for a three-drug cocktail of a sedative, a paralytic agent and a heart-stopping chemical, said Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in Sacramento.

The protocol was first adopted in Oklahoma in 1977, and “states just seem to copy [it] without much scientific backup for what they adopted,” he said.

Scheidegger, whose organization actively defends capital punishment in major court cases, said two events in the last year have given the issue momentum: an article in a medical journal and action by the Supreme Court.
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Then, in recent months, the Supreme Court agreed to stay two executions in Florida until it resolved the question of whether death row inmates can bring last-minute civil rights challenges that execution by lethal injection is cruel and unusual.

Those cases are not a direct challenge to Florida’s execution procedure, but the Supreme Court’s action prompted immediate reaction from Gov. Jeb Bush.

Earlier this month, Bush said he would not sign any more execution warrants until the issue was resolved.

“We don’t know why the Supreme Court’s done what it’s done, so the uncertainty probably does create a need to wait,” he said.(LA TImes 2/23/06)

And if Jeb Bush thinks we need to wait, don’t we?  Can we really expect anybody to more gung ho on exections than a Bush?  But, we have him as our Governor.  Governor Schwarzenegger has so far refused to step in to stop the executions until we can determine if this is cruel.

While California’s case is really only symptomatic, it does turn the attention of the nation’s largest state to the issue.  And perhaps that’s one more step towards ending the death penalty.