Sometimes you need a joke about a cute but very angry desert rain frog to pre­pare an unsus­pect­ing audi­ence for a seri­ous dis­cus­sion of lethal-injec­tion exe­cu­tions in the United States. That was the approach under­tak­en by Last Week Tonight, the satir­i­cal week­ly HBO com­e­dy-news show host­ed by John Oliver, as Oliver addressed the dead­ly seri­ous issue of lethal injec­tion in the show’s May 5, 2019 episode. Oliver called the death penal­ty ​“a wrong, bad thing the gov­ern­ment should not be able to do,” but said that whether you are against the death penal­ty or not, the evi­dence graph­i­cal­ly demon­strates that lethal injec­tion is a ​“hor­ri­fy­ing” way to car­ry it out.

In the twen­ty-minute seg­ment, Oliver out­lined sev­er­al of the rea­sons he oppos­es the death penal­ty, includ­ing wrong­ful con­vic­tions, lack of deter­rent effect, and cost. ​“There’s actu­al­ly no proof it has an effect on bring­ing down crime, [and] it’s tech­ni­cal­ly more expen­sive to exe­cute some­one than to keep them in prison for life,” he explained, cit­ing DPIC’s 2009 report, Smart on Crime, for data on the cost of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. ​“According to one study, around 4% of peo­ple sen­tenced to death are actu­al­ly inno­cent, which in itself, should give us pause about the whole enter­prise,” he added.

Oliver devot­ed most of the seg­ment to dis­cus­sion of the prob­lems and con­tro­ver­sy sur­round­ing the use of lethal injec­tion. ​“Let’s start with the idea that it’s med­ical, that is more than a bit of a stretch, because lethal injec­tions aren’t per­formed by med­ical per­son­nel for a pret­ty obvi­ous rea­son,” Oliver said, quot­ing death-penal­ty researcher Michael Radelet, who said, ​“It vio­lates eth­i­cal codes for physi­cians to be involved.” Recounting the his­to­ry of lethal injec­tion, Oliver explained that the for­mu­la was invent­ed by an Oklahoma med­ical exam­in­er who called him­self ​“an expert in dead bod­ies, but not an expert in get­ting them that way.” Oliver described him as ​“just an enthu­si­ast with a can-do atti­tude for killing peo­ple.” He also crit­i­cized an expert wit­ness who has tes­ti­fied in sup­port of the use of mida­zo­lam for sev­er­al death-penal­ty states. Dr. Roswell Lee Evans, Oliver said, has been a key wit­ness for six states, but he has nev­er con­duct­ed any research on any kind of anes­thet­ic. Dr. Evans pre­sent­ed 150 pages of print­outs from drugs​.com in his 300-page expert report for a case before the U.S. Supreme Court. ​“Incredibly, in our desire to find a more humane method, we’ve end­ed up let­ting ama­teurs both invent and admin­is­ter a form of unpre­dictable tor­ture,” Oliver said.

He went on to describe how the use of mida­zo­lam has cre­at­ed new prob­lems with lethal injec­tion, as it does not ade­quate­ly anes­thetize pris­on­ers before a suf­fo­cat­ing par­a­lyt­ic and a pro­found­ly painful heart-stop­ping drug are admin­is­tered. ​“You could be ful­ly aware, feel like you’re suf­fo­cat­ing, but unable to move or com­mu­ni­cate while fire is about to be inject­ed into your veins. And this some­how qual­i­fies as more humane than an elec­tric chair, which seems pret­ty debat­able at best,” he sum­ma­rized. Oliver con­clud­ed with a repu­di­a­tion of lethal injec­tion as a san­i­tized, humane exe­cu­tion method: ​“If the thing that’s mak­ing you com­fort­able with lethal injec­tion is that it’s humane, it isn’t. Because the fun­da­men­tal fact to under­stand about lethal injec­tion is, it is a show. It is designed not to min­i­mize the pain of peo­ple being exe­cut­ed, but to max­i­mize the com­fort of those who want to sup­port the death penal­ty with­out con­fronting the real­i­ty of it, which is that it’s vio­lent and it’s bru­tal, and it’s nev­er going to be any­thing oth­er than that.”

(John Oliver, Last Week Tonight, HBO, May 5, 2019; Ryan Reed, John Oliver on Horrific, Inhumane Reality of Lethal Injections, Rolling Stone, May 6, 2019; Dream McClinton, John Oliver on lethal injec­tions: ​‘hor­ri­fy­ing’ and ​‘unpre­dictable’, The Guardian, May 6, 2019.) (Warning: con­tains sex­u­al con­tent and explic­it lan­guage.) See Lethal Injection.

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