Published: October 04, 2007 12:41 am            

Informal talks opened door to lethal injection

Editor’s Note: This story is the first in a series examining the death penalty from both opponents of and those in favor of lethal injection.



It was a long time ago, said Dr. Gerry Etheredge, when he was speaking with Dr. Ralph Gray about lethal doses of drugs.

The thing that had brought these two men together — Etheredge, a veterinarian by trade, and Gray, then the Medical Director of the Texas Department of Corrections — was lethal injection, a process that Gray, along with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, would spearhead.

“When they first started talking about lethal injection, I discussed with him the use of that drug,” Etheredge said.

That drug was Pavulon, more commonly known under its generic name of pancuronium bromide, a drug that is now at the forefront of what seems to be a nationwide halt to lethal injection in the U.S., as all ears wait for a decision from the Supreme Court.

That conversation over this simple drug may have shaped the current method of lethal injection in the state, but it wasn’t the first in what one Supreme Court justice called a “machinery of death,” and an “experiment (that) has failed.”



An experiment in death

While Texas was the first to use the brand-new lethal injection protocol in 1982, it got its start some five years earlier in nearby Oklahoma.

Bill Wiseman, a Republican state representative from Tulsa, was in the capitol building the day the Oklahoma House of Representatives voted to re-instate the death penalty after a lengthy halt in the U.S.

Looking for a more humane way to execute the condemned — at the time, hanging, firing squad, the gas chamber and the electric chair were the only methods available — Wiseman called out to the Oklahoma Medical Association for help.

But no one from the medical field would help, citing their oath to save lives, not take them.

"I muttered to colleagues that it looked as if I would need to find a veterinarian to tell me how to 'put down' condemned prisoners," Wiseman told the Christian Century magazine in 2001.

But he did find help in Jay Chapman, Oklahoma’s medical examiner, who offered a rough outline of the lethal injection procedure used today.

According to records, Oklahoma passed the bill, drafted by Wiseman and Chapman, on May 10, 1997. Texas passed a similar bill the next day.

The bill didn’t specify the type of drugs to be used, other than to roughly specify the mechanics of them, leaving the actual policy of the drugs and amounts used up to the then Texas Department of Corrections.

It was now that Gray entered the picture, and his conversation with Etheredge would be paramount.



Of mice and men

When told of the drugs Gray intended to use, Gray suggested an alternative: a method that Etheredge already knew worked.

Phenobarbital sodium, a drug commonly used in the euthanization of animals, was considered as the one and only drug to be used in lethal injections.

But Gray said the drug wouldn’t stand up in the court of public opinion.

“Dr. Gray’s feelings on it were they would start equating lethal injection with killing dogs and that there would be public outcry against it and they had to come up with something different,” Etheredge said. “ At least that's what Dr. Gray said, and that sounds good to me.”

So Gray developed the current protocol, and it quickly was copied by 36 other states.

Seen as a more humane way to execute the condemned versus the alternatives, it quickly became the preferred — and increasingly more common — protocol used in the nation.

When used in the euthanization of animals, Etheredge claims the drug is very effective and causes no pain to the animals.

“This works too well (to use anything else),” Etheredge said. “It’s too smooth, it’s too safe and you only have to give one drug. It’s painless.”

On the flip side, Etheredge quotes doctors who say the current procedure is painless and poses no real risk of unnecessary pain.

“Both anesthesiologists who are in favor of lethal injection and those who are opposed to lethal injection — except for the activists — have said the cocktail that is given is safe and painless,” Etheredge said. “At least from the standpoint that you're not going to cause the individual taking the drugs any undue stress.”

“Well, obviously that's a stressful situation to begin with.”

Etheredge said that, even so, he suggested the method to Gray because he believed it to be the preferred method.

Then why wasn’t it adopted?

“It’s a political thing,” Etheredge said.



Copy and paste

In 2002, a delegation from the state of Alabama took a visit to Texas. But this visit was all business.

The delegation — including Grant Culliver, the then-warden of the Hollman Correctional Facility, home to the state’s death row and execution chamber — visited the Huntsville “Walls” Unit and witnessed an execution at the facility.

“We visited Texas and witnessed an execution there,” Culliver said in a 2002 interview with The Atmore Advance. “It was very professional and handled well. Everything went according to plan.”

The process, Culliver said, was heavily copied from Texas’ own, after the Legislature in Alabama passed a law requiring the state to partially retire the electric chair, known affectionately as “Yellow Mama” because of its bright yellow appearance, and switch to lethal injection as its primary means of execution.

Other states took the lead from Texas, even though Oklahoma pioneered the idea of lethal injection, after a track record of uneventful executions.

According to a report from the Human Rights Watch, an anti-death penalty group, a legal case over Louisiana’s copying of Texas’ method brought a flurry of controversy over how the process was developed.

A Louisiana prison pharmacy director, Donald Courts, according to the group had the following conversation with a Texas prison official about the executions.

“We were getting ready to hang up the phone, and I said, ‘I have but just one question I need to ask you,” Courts said. “Every other state I have spoken to is using 2 grams of sodium pentothal. Why are y’all using five?’ And he started laughing and said, ‘Well, you see, when we did our very first execution, the only thing I had on hand was a 5-gram vial. And rather than do the paperwork on wasting 3 grams, we just gave all five.’”



Wait and see

A case before the Supreme Court now has massive implications for the future of lethal injection in the nation, opponents and proponents of the procedure say.

But its scope is narrow, only focusing on the drugs used in the current protocol of all but one state that uses the method.

The court is not expected to rule on the case until sometime next year, and its consequences could change the process of execution throughout the nation.

Dennis Longmire, an outspoken critic of the death penalty and professor of criminal justice at Sam Houston State University, said the case brings a time of pause that could be used to examine other methods of execution.

“I'm not an executioner or expert on it, but it’s worth noting that in any technique we use that requires an injection-based process we have to rely on some sort of chemical we have the problem of maintaining reliabilty,” Longmire said. “I hope if anything comes out of the Baze case there is a requirement that states provide some sort of monitoring through the process to ensure if something is going wrong they can do something to intervene or stop the problem.”

But proponents of the process say there is nothing wrong with the way things are.

Walker County Criminal District Attorney David Weeks said he believes the process to be humane.

“I have been to an execution,” Weeks said. “It was a case I tried and I went to be with the victims family. It went very smoothly. They have a plan and procedure they follow very closely.”

Even so, Weeks — who has prosecuted several capitol murder cases — believes the decision on how to implement the procedure is in good hands with the courts and the state Legislature.

“How they execute them, that's really for the legislators and others to decide,” Weeks said. “I don't really have an opinion one way or the other.”

        

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