There was this sheep, you see and I can’t remember its name.
‘Fang’?
No.
Perhaps it didn’t have a name?
I remember it was an older sheep and quite large too. It was for our third year physiology experiment.
Might be just as well it didn’t have a name, then?
We had to anaesthetise it, venesect it, resuscitate it and then when it was dead, haul it into a large garbage bin: a big black plastic one with wheels and a lid.
You mean you had to put it to sleep?
No, we killed it.
What’s wrong with that? You had to do it. It was part of your learning. It’s only a sheep.
Did you know that sheep are hard to keep alive? It takes a lot of effort to ventilate an anaesthetised sheep with a piece of garden hose and a large plastic bag.
How did you do it?
What?
Kill the sheep.
Lethobarb. Sodium pentobarbital. It’s bright fluorescent green so you can’t mistake it for anything else.
Is it painless?
Supposedly so.
Still. Poor old sheep.
Yep.
Since the 1970s, when capital punishment resumed in the US, articles about lethal injection have appeared in the medico-legal literature; about one or two a year. Recently, however, there has been a string of comments turn up in the New England Journal of Medicine and, to a lesser extent, in Lancet.
The editorials discuss the ins and outs of execution methodology, what is or isn’t “cruel and unusual punishment” and the ethics of physician involvement, from research to actually pushing the drugs (thiopental, an anaesthetic drug, pancuronium, a paralysing agent and potassium chloride, to induce cardiac arrest).
Certainly, the authors and the people to whom these articles are directed may be ill-educated or psychologically conditioned by the society in which they live. However, they are not ‘un’-educated, they do live in a democracy (or, so they say) and they are physicians. How can they not see that capital punishment is spiritual delinquency? Medically sanitised or not, execution is an atrocity, reflecting human nature at its most base.
Intellectual posturing on the pros and cons of lethal injection is no moral relief. The physician's absence of protest against capital punishment and therefore complicity is an abhorrence in itself.
