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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