Missouri’s Execution Doctor Was Deceptive and Publicly Reprimanded

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch recent­ly uncov­ered hos­pi­tal files indi­cat­ing that Dr. Alan R. Doerhoff, a Missouri physi­cian who assist­ed with the state’s exe­cu­tions and who devel­oped the state’s lethal injec­tion pro­to­col, gave mis­lead­ing answers dur­ing a 1999 mal­prac­tice suit about hav­ing his hos­pi­tal priv­i­leges revoked. In 1998, Doerhoff’s med­ical priv­i­leges were revoked from the Lake of the Ozarks General Hospital. Doerhoff was also denied priv­i­leges at St. Mary’s Health Center in Jefferson City in 2000, and he had been sued over 20 times for mal­prac­tice through­out his career. He was also rep­ri­mand­ed in 2003 by the state Board of Healing Arts for fail­ing to dis­close mal­prac­tice suits against him.

Doerhoff, who devised Missouri’s lethal injec­tion pro­ce­dure and super­vised over 50 exe­cu­tions, gained noto­ri­ety when he tes­ti­fied last year that he was dyslex­ic and often con­fused the names and amounts of the lethal injec­tion drugs. He also changed the lethal injec­tion pro­to­col, which was not writ­ten down, at will. A Missouri fed­er­al judge found this so trou­bling that he halt­ed lethal injec­tions in the state.

Doerhoff orig­i­nal­ly tes­ti­fied anony­mous­ly, but his name was revealed by the Post-Dispatch, insti­gat­ing a law to pro­tect the iden­ti­ties of those who par­tic­i­pate in Missouri exe­cu­tions. While the state con­tends that the law is to pro­tect the safe­ty of exe­cu­tion­ers, Kent Gipson, of the Public Interest Litigation Clinic in Kansas City, sug­gest­ed to the Post-Dispatch that instead ​“it was to hide the embar­rass­ment of hir­ing some­body with that many prob­lems.”

According to the Post-Dispatch, Dr. Doerhoff is now on staff at a hair-removal busi­ness in Jefferson City and has made trips with groups of physi­cians to treat the Third World poor.
(“Lake hos­pi­tal’s let­ters deal cru­cial blow to cred­i­bil­i­ty of exe­cu­tion doc­tor,” by Jeremy Kohler, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 20, 2008). See Lethal Injection and Supreme Court.