Death on the Gurney:
An Idea Made in Oklahoma
by Kevin Acers
Few people realize that lethal injection as a method of killing prisoners   was first conceived of in Oklahoma.  Prior to the US Supreme Execution chamber at Oklahoma State Penitentiary Court-mandated suspension of capital punishment in 1972, Oklahoma’s executions were carried out with the electric chair. When this moratorium was lifted, some Oklahoma lawmakers took a new look at our state’s execution capabilities.

It turned out that the state’s electric chair was badly in need of repair. It would cost some $60,000 to take it out of the mothballs and restore it to working order. With that in mind, a state senator conferred in 1977 with the chief of anesthesiology at the OU Health Sciences Center. He confirmed that lethal injection would be a viable alternative to repairing the electric chair and would be "extremely humane." Two months later, Oklahoma signed into law the world’s first lethal injection statute. Not to be outdone, Texas enacted an identical law the very next day. Lethal injection quickly became the method of choice in most death penalty jurisdictions.

Lethal injection has not been without controversy. For death penalty opponents, it leads to "Schwartzchild’s Paradox": Some methods of execution are worse than others (for example, drawing-and-quartering is worse than the gas chamber), but no method of execution is better than any other (lethal injection is no improvement over electrocution).

Unlike other methods of execution, lethal injection requires the participation of medical professionals, either directly or indirectly. A physician or medical assistant must either insert the poison-delivery system (a catheter) into the prisoner’s veins, or must train prison staff to do so. A physician must provide the "medicines" which kill the prisoner, as well as pronounce the executed prisoner dead. All this has raised objections from numerous medical organizations. Some physicians have urged that the medical profession totally boycott executions. (Not all agree. Dr. Jack Kevorkian, for one, has asserted that physicians have an ethical obligation to actively participate in lethal injections, and that while doing so they should conduct medical experiments and then transplant the prisoner’s organs for use by law-abiding citizens.)

An influential article in the New England Journal of Medicine (1980) by attorney William Curran and physician Ward Casscells called upon the entire medical community to denounce lethal injection: "The ethical principles of the medical profession worldwide should be interpreted to unconditionally condemn medical participation in this new form of capital punishment...It presents the most serious and intimate challenge in modern American history to active medical participation in state-ordered killings of human beings."

Some prison officials also balked at the notion of reintroducing executions with this new "humane" method. In January 1980, Oklahoma State Penitentiary’s warden Norman Hess resigned from that job when faced with the prospect of participating in lethal injections. "Taking a life is not part of me," he said, "and I can’t stomach it. Who can say that the person may not strain or struggle against the straps?"

Since that time, of course, we have seen numerous botched and inhumane executions by lethal injection. We have also seen behavior by members of the medical profession that raise serious ethical questions, as in the case of Oklahoma death row inmate Robert Brecheen. Following a suicide attempt on the night of his scheduled 1995 execution, Brecheen was revived by the same physician who a few hours later participated in his execution. This doctor insisted on personally taking charge of the emergency room treatment for his overdose, and then accompanied the barely-conscious Brecheen to the execution chamber for his death.

In the end, Texas did beat Oklahoma to the gurney. The first such execution took place on December 7, 1982, when Charlie Brook died by lethal injection in Huntsville. It wasn’t until Oklahoma's executions resumed with the 1990 killing of Charles Coleman that the birthplace of this new chapter in the history of capital punishment began strapping down our own death row inmates and sticking in the needles. Still, Oklahoma can lay claim to the dubious honor of introducing this "innovation" to humanity.
Author Kevin Acers is a social worker, former public high school teacher and human rights advocate based in Oklahoma City.  He is the former president of the Oklahoma City chapter of Amnesty International and a past board member of the Oklahoma Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.
Source material: Executing the Mentally Ill, by Kent S. Miller and Michael L. Radelet, 1993, Sage Publications

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