By Rosalind Bentley
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A humane end, or cruel and unusual?
The narrative around lethal injection drugs in the United States has been complicated since 1977. That’s when Dr. Jay Chapman, an Oklahoma medical examiner, developed a three-drug combination that could be used in place of electrocution to execute prisoners.
Lethal injection was considered by some officials to be “less barbarous” and was first used to kill a prisoner in Texas in 1982. The method was soon adopted by other states, including Georgia, which switched from electrocution to lethal injection in 2001.
Over the past 35 years, the specific drugs have changed, and, in some states, the number of drugs used has been modified from three to two or even one drug.
Yet, how the drugs work is an enduring point of contention. The intent of lethal injection is to end a prisoner’s life without pain. In the video below, we show you how the drugs are supposed to work in both three-drug and one-drug protocols. Later, we’ll show:
· What can go wrong during the process of lethal injection.
· A video of an actual drug that was rejected because it was “cloudy.”
· Video of AJC staff writer Rhonda Cook, who has witnessed more than a dozen executions, including one of the last electrocutions performed in Georgia.
· Excerpts from the AJC’s groundbreaking 2007 examination of how the death penalty is applied in Georgia.
AJC reporter Rhonda Cook has witnessed more than a dozen executions. In these videos, she describes how the methods have changed and what it's like to be in attendance.
MORE VIDEOS WITH RHONDA COOK
On being a monitor:
Should doctors participate in executions?
The role of medical professionals in executions has always been a minefield. Whether they observe on behalf of the state, insert the IVs for lethal injection drugs, or make the pronouncement of death, the role of doctors, nurses, emergency medical technicians and paramedics has been viewed by many as ethically problematic: How can someone who is supposed to preserve life actively work to end it?
Medical boards and associations have condemned the practice, with one threatening to revoke the certification of any doctor who assists in an execution. Though Georgia's execution procedures and identities of assisting personnel are now shielded by law, years before the statute was enacted a handful of doctors in the state assisted with lethal injections. Some helped to insert intravenous catheters that delivered the drugs. Some verified that the inmate was dead after receiving a toxic dose. They were typically paid between $850 to a few thousand dollars per execution.
Physicians who assisted in executions became the targets of lawsuits brought by other doctors who were death penalty opponents. The opponents wanted to see their colleagues medical licenses revoke. Ten years ago one such lawsuit against a Georgia doctor failed, but it highlighted the questionable role of health care practitioners in ending the lives of prisoners.
Here are statements from some of the professional organizations that have either prohibited or warned their members against involvement in executions.
Kelly Gissendaner
In 1997 Kelly Gissendaner conspired with her boyfriend, Gregory Bruce Owen, to kill Gissendaner's husband for insurance money.
Owen beat and stabbed Doug Gissendaner and left him for dead in a wooded area of Gwinnett County in February that year.
Both Kelly Gissendaner and Owen were later charged with Doug's murder. They were offered a plea deal. Owen took it, Gissendaner opted for a trial because the deal required a life sentence with possibility of parole after 25 years.
Gissendaner was convicted and sentenced to death in 1998.
Over the next 17 years, her lawyers tried to get her sentence changed to reflect what Owen got. Their argument: Kelly Gissendaner did not actually wield the nightstick or knife that killed her husband. They also pointed to Gissendaner's apparent reformation while in prison. She'd gotten a divinity degree and counseled new prisoners. Despite those arguments, her appeals were routinely rejected, including by the United States Supreme Court in the hours before she was actually put to death on Sept. 30, 2015.
In the death chamber she expressed remorse for the crime and wished her husband's family a measure of peace. She sang a tearful rendition of "Amazing Grace," until the execution drugs killed her.
MORE COVERAGE
From 2004: Kelly Gissendaner's final interview
Feb. 22, 2015: Gissendaner gets death while killer gets life
Sept. 27, 2015: Questions remain on cloudy drug
Sept. 30, 2015: Gissendaner executed
Troy Davis
Troy Davis' case is among the most contentious in recent death penalty history.
Police Officer Mark MacPhail went out to stop a fight in a Burger King parking lot one night in 1989. He'd been moonlighting at an adjacent Greyhound Bus station as a security guard. MacPhail was shot in the face and chest in the lot. At the time, several witnesses said Davis fired the gun. One said Davis later told him he'd shot MacPhail. The gun wasn't recovered but investigators said the ballistics matched another shooting Davis was linked to.
Davis got a death sentence in 1991. He said he never told anyone he shot MacPhail.
Later, in multiple appeals that reached the U. S. Supreme Court, Davis's attorneys presented affidavits from witnesses in the original trial. The witnesses said they'd been mistaken, that Davis had not been the triggerman.
Sylvester "Red" Coles, who'd been in area the night of the shooting said he'd discarded a .38 caliber gun that night but he didn't know what happened to it. He implicated Davis in the murder, but was never arrested as suspect himself.
Davis' case, with its litany of recanting witnesses, turned into something of a celebrity cause and was championed by civil and human rights groups.
But in 2011, after all appeals were exhausted, Davis was killed by lethal injection.
MORE COVERAGE
Dec. 21, 2009: Troy Davis case raising novel legal issues
Sept. 16, 2011: Troy Davis case draws international attention
Sept. 22, 2011: Troy Davis, from gurney, proclaims innocence before execution
Warren Hill
Already serving a life sentence for shooting his 18-year-old girlfriend 11 times, Hill killed Joseph Handspike, another death row inmate in 1990. Hill beat him to death with a piece of wood that had been used to hold up a bathroom sink. Handspike was asleep at the time of the attack. A prison guard rushed to the cell after hearing the thuds and saw part of the attack.
The murder was not in question. Instead it was Hill's mental acuity. His IQ was 70. To avoid the death penalty, Georgia law requires anyone who has a mental disability to prove "beyond a reasonable doubt," that he or she is suffers from retardation. It is the most stringent standard of proof required by any state.
Life without parole was not offered as an option at sentencing. After years of appeals, including one that challenged Georgia's lethal injection shield law, Hill was executed in January 2015.
MORE COVERAGE
Feb. 14, 2013: State experts change opinions in condemned killer's case
Jan. 27, 2015: Parole Board denies clemency for Hill
Jan. 27, 2015: Five questions on the Warren Hill death case
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