Lethal Injection

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Laws in Belgium and The Netherlands permit euthanasia and assisted suicide for seriously ill children who experience "constant and unbearable suffering"--they have the capacity to request death by lethal injection if they convey a "reasonable understanding of the consequences" of that request. The child's capacity to understand death is therefore a prerequisite to the implementation of the request. However, modern neuro-psychological and fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) studies of the relationship between the neuro-anatomical development of the brain in human beings and their emotional and experiential capacity demonstrates that both are not fully developed until the early 20s for girls and mid-20s for boys...

BACKGROUND: Little is known about the differences between physicians in training and post training in their willingness to comply with patient requests at the end of life. OBJECTIVE: To compare the attitudes of attendings and residents regarding a range of patient requests at the end of life DESIGN: Written, cross-sectional survey PARTICIPANTS: The cohort included 191 attendings randomly selected across the state of Connecticut and 240 residents from 2 university-affiliated Internal Medicine programs...

If capital punishment is constitutional, as it has long been held to be, then it "necessarily follows that there must be a means of carrying it out." So the Supreme Court concluded in Baze v. Rees, a 2008 challenge to Kentucky's lethal-injection protocol, in which the Court held that the means used..

Several independent elements have recently combined to thrust United States capital punishment into a chaos. Corrections officials and policy makers have attempted to "humanize" capital punishment by evolving into a chemical execution process, and soften the outward appearance. Foreign policies have interrupted chemical protocols by banning key ingredients. These disruptions are spawning new theories of legal challenges in capital punishment. This is a critical time for stakeholders and all members of a civilized society to pause and reflect on the role of capital punishment...

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Palliative sedation evolved from within the practice of palliative medicine and has become adopted by other areas of medicine, such as within intensive care practice. Clinician's usually come across this practice for dying patients who are foregoing or having life support terminated. A number of intolerable and intractable symptom burdens can occur during the end of life period that may require the use of palliative sedation. Furthermore, when patients receive palliative sedation, the continued use of hydration and nutrition becomes an issue of consideration and there are contentious bioethical issues involved in using or withholding these life-sustaining provisions...

Lethal injection of potassium chloride (KCl) can be used as a method of either suicide or homicide. As biological tests are still inadequate to differentiate endogenous from exogenous potassium, at the scene of death the cause can only be suspected. We wished to determine the usefulness of conventional pathological examination in this context and carried out a study in four fetuses after medical termination of pregnancy for serious disease. Pregnancy was terminated by KCl injection in two cases and by injection of lidocaine and sufentanil in the other two cases...

OBJECTIVE: To create and implement a required module that addresses both the clinical and ethical issues surrounding the use of lethal injection as a means of capital punishment. DESIGN: As a component of a pharmacotherapeutics module in toxicology, pharmacy students were introduced to ethical and clinical considerations and controversies with the use of drugs as a means of capital punishment. Basic information was provided on the history of capital punishment and the origins of lethal injection...

BACKGROUND: It has been found that physicians condone colleague involvement in capital punishment. Physicians' own willingness to participate has not been explored. OBJECTIVE: To examine physicians' willingness to be involved in cases of capital punishment. DESIGN: Survey exploring physicians' willingness to participate in 10 aspects of capital punishment by lethal injection, 8 of which are disallowed by the American Medical Association. SETTING: United States...

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Anaesthesia during lethal injection is essential to minimise suffering and to maintain public acceptance of the practice. Lethal injection is usually done by sequential administration of thiopental, pancuronium, and potassium chloride. Protocol information from Texas and Virginia showed that executioners had no anaesthesia training, drugs were administered remotely with no monitoring for anaesthesia, data were not recorded and no peer-review was done. Toxicology reports from Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina showed that post-mortem concentrations of thiopental in the blood were lower than that required for surgery in 43 of 49 executed inmates (88%); 21 (43%) inmates had concentrations consistent with awareness...

BACKGROUND: Lethal injection for execution was conceived as a comparatively humane alternative to electrocution or cyanide gas. The current protocols are based on one improvised by a medical examiner and an anesthesiologist in Oklahoma and are practiced on an ad hoc basis at the discretion of prison personnel. Each drug used, the ultrashort-acting barbiturate thiopental, the neuromuscular blocker pancuronium bromide, and the electrolyte potassium chloride, was expected to be lethal alone, while the combination was intended to produce anesthesia then death due to respiratory and cardiac arrest...