Side Effects

By now, many of us have heard the story of the execution of a murderer in Ohio who seemed to refuse to die after he was injected with lethal drugs. Instead of passing on quickly and painlessly as expected, he appeared to struggle for at least 10 minutes, at one point clenching his fist.

Apparently, authorities in Ohio had to use a new combination of drugs, because the European pharmaceutical companies that make what Ohio had previously employed to kill bad guys didn’t want their products used for executions anymore. Ohio was running out of its supply of the Europeans' stuff, so it came up with its own, previously untried "cocktail."

Please forgive me when I say there’s a faint Final Solution-y echo to this discussion. The difference being, of course, that the Nazis weren’t worried about whether their victims died in pain – their concern was efficiency and cost – pfennigs and Deutschmarks.

This is not a subject for humor – but because it’s so black it almost begs for it. Some might say, for example, that Big Pharma shouldn’t be relied upon to supply something that would kill quickly – they are much better at killing us slowly….When it comes to execution drugs, should there be a warning label on them saying that one of the unintended side effects may be LIFE?...One of my favorite lines from a prominent comedian, uttered during the first Jerry Brown administration, concerned California’s obsession with green power. “Don’t commit a capital offense here,” said the comic. “Gov. Jerry Brown will put you in a solar-powered electric chair, and it will take you a year to die!” Ba-doom-boom.

I’ve often wondered what method of execution produces the quickest death. It turns out this is all quite a science. I saw that movie about an English expert whose advice was sought before every hanging when the U.K. still used that method. He had to calculate the weight of the bad guy, the length of the drop, etc., which involved a detailed knowledge of both anatomy and physics. The unsavory elements of the electric chair and the gas chamber are well known to us, thanks to Hollywood. Personally, I always thought the French had it right. The guillotine, while messy, seems to get the job done.

In my blackest humor on this topic, I once joked that executions should be publicly available live pay-per-view cable TV events, with the proceeds going to the crime victim’s family. I kept that to myself, thinking it was too crude a thing to say, but somebody eventually came up with the same idea and turned it into a movie.

Ah, but aren’t the victim’s family and friends entitled to just a little revenge? An Ohio judge said there was nothing in the law that guaranteed a pain-free execution.

Wow. I think we need to stop here, take a breath, and play back some of this. Can we really be seriously discussing (with all the appropriate legal head-scratching) the best methods to use for a painless execution? Do we not have a forest-and-trees problem here?

All I can say is, after using any of these, if death is taking more than four hours, contact a physician immediately.