Prison officers at California's San Quentin prison were forced to halt the execution of a man convicted of the rape and murder of a 17-year-old girl when two anaesthetists backed out for ethical reasons.
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The American Medical Association, the American Society of Anesthesiologists and the California Medical Association have all opposed the doctors’ participation as unethical and unprofessional.
Prison officials rescheduled the execution for this evening, and said that they would employ a different technique: administering a fatal overdose of barbiturate in lieu of the three-drug cocktail typically used in lethal injections.
Morales’s lawyers had successfully argued that the three-part lethal injection cocktail used in California and 35 other states would violate the Eighth Amendment prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment if he were not fully sedated.
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At his trial, Morales was convicted of having attacked Winchell from behind and tried to strangle her with his belt in January 1981. He then beat her into unconsciousness with a hammer, raped her and started to leave before going back and stabbing her four times in the chest to make sure that she was dead.
This is interesting. In a previous post, I posed the following question:
If we believe we have the right to decide to end someone's life, then why is torture such a big deal? Which is worse?
To which Ed responded,
I think the framers believed that, yes, torture WAS worse than death. That's why they included no "cruel and unusual punishment" in the Constitution. Tis better to go quickly than slowly and painfully.
I agree with that to some extent. If I know I'm going to die anyway, then yes, I would choose to skip the torture part. But it still seems foolish to me that we're so worried about making convicts comfortable right before we kill them. Are we really trying to soothe the condemned, or our own conscience?
Related posts:
With great power comes great responsibility
Voting their conscience
Values a la carte
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