One of the nation’s leading academic experts on the death penalty has written a new article describing how the controversy surrounding lethal injections has greatly intensified since the Supreme Court’s ruling on the subject in 2008 (Baze v. Rees). Deborah Denno, a law professor at Fordham University, analyzed over 300 court decisions in the last five years citing Baze. She found there have been more changes in lethal injection protocols in that time than in the last 30 years, some of which have made matters worse. “The resulting protocols,” she wrote, “differ from state to state, and even from one execution to the next within the same state,” scarcely resembling those evaluated by the Supreme Court. As a result, “[T]this continuous tinkering often affects already troubled aspects of states’ lethal injection procedures, such as the paltry qualifications of executioners, the absence of medical experts, and the failure to account for difficulties injecting inmates whose drug-using histories diminish the availability of usable veins.” She also addressed states’ attempts to handle drug shortages, including changing drugs and turning to compounding pharmacies, whose recent record of contamination and resultant deaths have led to calls for greater regulatory oversight. She concluded, “Until death penalty states are willing to focus more on solutions than secrecy, lethal injection as a method of execution will remain mired in an endless cycle of difficulty and disorder.”

(D. Denno, “Lethal Injection Secrecy Post-Baze,” 102 Georgetown Law Journal __, forthcoming 2014; DPIC posted Sept. 24, 2013). See Lethal Injection and Law Reviews.

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