NCJ Number
226004
Journal
Criminal Justice Studies Volume: 21 Issue: 4 Dated: December 2008 Pages: 271-282
Date Published
December 2008
Length
12 pages
Annotation
This paper discusses methods of capital punishment in general and the current practice of lethal injection in particular, including the recent ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court in Baze v. Rees (2008).
Abstract
Although earlier methods of capital punishment were specifically intended to be cruel and extremely painful, the more recent methods adopted in the United States have sought to minimize pain for those executed. The United States has progressed from hanging in colonial times through the 19th century, to the use of the firing squad. Electrocution was prominent from 1890, followed by the use of lethal gas as an innovation deemed more humane than electrocution. The most recent and popular method of execution is lethal injection. Lethal injection has been challenged, however, as being too painful by those who argue that the first drug of the three-drug sequence does not adequately anesthetize the prisoner, causing him/her to experience the pain of suffocation and cardiac arrest under the administration of the remaining two drugs. A recent U.S. Supreme Court decision on the issue of lethal injection as a violation of the eighth amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment holds that the risk of pain to the prisoner under lethal injection does not rise to the level of an eighth-amendment violation. Still, the court observed that the eighth amendment is only a minimum standard and the fact that lethal injection as a means of execution does not rise to a violation of the U.S. Constitution does not preclude States from changing execution methods, as they have done for well over a century. This article advises that States should continue to make their execution method more humane, which means addressing the flaws in the administration of lethal injection such that death is caused as painlessly as possible. 27 references