By Brian Vastag
Prisoners killed by lethal injection may be conscious and may experience excruciating pain and burning sensations while they asphyxiate, according to a new report.
“The design of the lethal-drug scheme itself is flawed,” say Leonidas Koniaris of the University of Miami and his colleagues in the April PLoS Medicine.
The researchers point to low post-mortem blood concentrations of sedatives and several reports of prisoners who required a second round of injections.
No ethical board or oversight group has ever evaluated the three-drug cocktail used by the federal government and by most of the 37 states that execute prisoners, say the researchers.