In the picture is a real image of the United States lethal injection of death row prisoners. The man in the picture is wearing a white prison uniform and lying on a execution chair with the support of police officers.
Originally, after three injections, the prisoner would have died unconscious, but this time something went wrong, causing the prisoner to wake up and moan in pain.
So what happened during this execution?Why would the United States carry out such a fallible method of execution?
At the scene of lethal injection, the man was in agony after failing to inject him.
In the video, we see a bearded man, supported by an execution officer, walking into the room where lethal injection was carried out, and he is Clayton, Oklahoma. The room in front of him was very simple, surrounded by white walls, a recliner, and many syringes and medical equipment to measure vital signs. On the surface, it looks like a hospital room.
Soon the man in the white prison uniform was taken to the recliner. The expression on his face had begun to strain a little as the execution officer immobilized his limbs. At this point, the officers began to adjust the equipment and insert needles into his veins. In the face of death, he pursed his lips with a nervous look, and was looked at by the family members across the wall.
In this execution, the family of the condemned prisoner would watch him die through a glass in the next room. Although this man was sentenced for many evils, he has always been very kind in front of his relatives. In the footage, a woman looks at him as he is about to die, and also sheds tears, silently wiping it with a tissue.
At this time, the execution police pinned a microphone to the condemned prisoner, so that he could talk to his relatives in the next room through this and leave his last words. And in the face of death, the condemned prisoner closed his eyes and said in a painful voice: "Madam, forgive me, I can't support you anymore." ”
After that, while apologizing to his family, the man also reflected on what he had done, saying, "I know you will be disappointed in me, and I hope you can live a normal life and take care of yourself in the future." His voice trembled all the time, and he could hear his fear of death and his guilt for his loved ones.
While the condemned prisoner said goodbye to his family, the pharmacist in another room was also dispensing the medicines. In this case, the prisoner was given three injections. The first injection was an anesthetic drug that put the prisoner to sleep. As the condemned prisoner informed the judge that he had finished his farewell, the tube of medicine entered the condemned prisoner's body through a long flexible tube.
It didn't take long for the condemned prisoner to begin to feel sleepy and then fall into a deep sleep. After the medical equipment showed that he had been successfully anesthetized, the executive pushed in a second tube of liquid under the judge's order. This tube is a muscle relaxant that immobilizes the prisoner's muscles. In this way, if the anesthetic fails halfway, the condemned prisoner will not be able to struggle.
Soon, the machine showed that the muscle relaxant had also worked. The next medicine to be injected is the real death medicine - potassium chloride, which can instantly stop the heartbeat of the condemned prisoner. At that time, most of the chlorides used in the United States were chlorides, and high concentrations of chloride could create respiratory alkalosis, which would cause respiratory failure and further stop the heartbeat.
However, it was at this point that the execution went awry. I saw that after the death row prisoner was injected with the third tube of medicine, a painful look suddenly appeared on his face. According to past experience, the third dose of poison should kill instantly, and the prisoner will not wake up from the anesthetic state. However, the prisoner was awakened by the pain because the veins prevented the mixing of the poison and failed to let the poison exert a fatal effect. Then he let out a scream of pain.
At this time, according to the medical equipment, the prisoner's vital signs were still active, which means that this time the lethal injection was declared a failure. Seeing this, the judge in charge of recording immediately arranged for the injection to be stopped first. After hearing the screams, the prisoner's family members quickly stood up and gathered outside the window. However, the staff went to close the curtains and asked the family to leave the observation room. As they left, the screams continued to echo.
According to later records, the condemned prisoner was tortured by drugs for nearly 40 minutes in this failed lethal injection, and finally died of heart failure due to ruptured arteries. And this failure also runs counter to the original intention of the United States to adopt lethal injection.
The reason for lethal injection in the United States.
This is a real image of the failure of lethal injection in the United States, so why did the United States, which at that time still mainly used executions such as shooting and electric chairs, suddenly choose to adopt lethal injection?And who came up with this method?
In American society at that time, there were many ways to get the death penalty, such as shooting, beheading, electrocution, poison gas, etc. Lethal injection sounds very much like the execution method used in this century, but in fact, as early as the 70s of the last century, some people in the United States have proposed this "humane" death penalty.
Originally, in the 19th century, this concept was proposed by a doctor in New York, USA. However, the British Medical Council at the time rejected this method of saving money compared to hanging. They believed that with the level of medical research at that time, it was not possible to accurately know the amount of anesthesia and lethal dose that criminals needed, and it was easy to fail. In addition, it is disrespectful to the victim to let such sinners die. In short, because of the British Medical Council, this plan was stillborn.
However, on May 11, 1977, another American brought him out. The man's name was Jay Chapman, and he was a coroner in Oklahoma. He believes that whether it is the previous decapitation and shooting, or the electric chair poison gas, it is to make people die in torture. Although they were condemned to death, such a method of execution was inhumane.
At that time, many pets would have the option of euthanasia, which made Jay think, can people also be euthanized?If it is said that euthanasia for ordinary people is a kind of **, then euthanasia for death row prisoners should be a normal punishment. This will not only allow the condemned prisoner to die according to the original plan, but also allow him to die a more dignified and humane death, thus reflecting the advanced society.
And after proposing this method, Jay received the approval of many officials, most of whom were anesthesiologists and clergy. In the eyes of the anesthesiologist, this provides more job opportunities for their positions, while the clergy believe that this is recognized by God, a manifestation of democratic freedom, allowing prisoners to freely choose the way of death, and giving them the right to die.
This method was quickly adopted by the United States, which became the first country to implement lethal injection. The lethal injection method has many advantages: it is not only easy to operate, it is often processed automatically by computers, and at the same time, it can ensure the integrity of the body more than other methods, and can slightly alleviate the grief of the prisoner's family. In addition, the most important thing is its humanitarian spirit, which pays attention to the problem of human nature.
After the United States, China also announced the use of intravenous lethal injection in 1997, becoming the second country to adopt this method of execution. Since then, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam and other places have also begun to adopt it one after another.
Because this method of death is not as torturous as electrocution and poison gas, nor is it as devastating as shooting and beheading. As a result, more and more prisons are also carrying out lethal injection for death row inmates in accordance with the general trend. In China, however, this form of death has always been associated with shooting, due to differences in perception.
There is an old Chinese saying that "good is rewarded with good, and evil is rewarded with evil", if you do evil to the point of being sentenced to death, you must be a vicious person. It is disrespectful to let such a person die easily and without any pain, so at that time, many Chinese death row prisoners were still executed as before.
At the same time, many relevant experts said that China's standard for lethal injection has not yet taken shape, and the failure rate is as high as 72%。This brought the death penalty by lethal injection, which had just been introduced at that time, to the bottom, and many death row inmates still chose to die with one shot. However, with the continuous development of social science and technology, people's ideological concepts have gradually changed, and after many discussions, China still insists on implementing lethal injection. Today, many prisons in China allow death row inmates to be killed by injection.
There have been several failed cases in various states, with the famous case of 18 consecutive injections not dying.
This is a real image of the failure of lethal injection in the United States, with the prisoner in pain and his family by his side**. So why is there sometimes no way to ensure the success rate when lethal injection is implemented in the United States?And what are some of the failed cases of lethal injection that have attracted great attention?
In addition to this failed case, there are also quite a few death row inmates in various states in the United States who have failed to carry out lethal injections. And the reasons for their failure are varied: some are because the dosage of drugs is not enough, so the death row inmates cannot die immediately and are struggling in pain. Some have their own physical fitness problems, high resistance to certain types of drugs or other conditions.
In the United States, the most famous failed case of lethal injection is that in September 2009, Bloom, a prisoner who was to be executed in a California prison. He was once arrested and imprisoned for the murder of a 14-year-old girl in the flower season, and the judge found that the circumstances were extremely aggravating and required the death penalty. At that time, after thinking about it, Bloom chose to end his life by lethal injection.
However, in this execution, he escaped death 18 times, which is very shocking.
And this time, it was not the dosage of the medicine that stumped the executioner, but Bloom's physical condition - his veins were so difficult to find that the police had a hard time in the first step. They tried to stick needles in Bloom's arms, legs, feet, and even heads, but they couldn't find them without exception, and sometimes they even got into them, and the needles fell out on their own.
The needle piercing process was so long and painful that even the murderous Bloom himself was so anxious that he even begged the executioners to untie his other hand and let him help him kill him. Although he tried hard to make his veins bulge out from under the **, even if the veins appeared, the needle still kept slipping.
And the medical staff who executed them were all veterans, and it was impossible for them to stay in the middle of it. So, the anxious judge began to investigate the reason. When he saw Bloom's pre-sentence behavior, he suddenly realized that this guy was an addict who often injected drugs intravenously by himself, which caused blood clots over time, and it was difficult to have a working blood vessel in his body.
So after Bloom was stitched 18 times, the executioners finally gave up, reporting that the guy could not be executed by lethal injection. At this time, Bloom's lawyer seized the opportunity and began to say in court that Bloom's 18 stitches had already suffered inhuman torture, which was equivalent to accepting the death penalty and that the death should be changed to life.
But judges and prison administrators don't think so. In fact, Bloom has been in prison for 15 years and has been waiting in line for the death penalty. Everyone is very much looking forward to the execution of this guy who eats public in prison at this moment. However, in the past 15 years, he has either encountered a boring TV station and wanted to shoot a documentary to protect him, or there is a shortage of death penalty drugs, or the death penalty is too expensive to provide. Going round and round, more than ten years have passed. During this time, Bloom even published books and filmed films, and his life was actually in style.
Finally, after the failure of this lethal injection, he waited in line to be executed. But the drama happened – during this time, the coronavirus outbreak began across the country, and the prisons in the United States did not escape. In the end, the day before Bloom announced that he was going to be executed, the guy died of Covid.
Such a dramatic scene is also played out by lethal injection in various countries. Although the failure rate of lethal injection is still quite high, it has never been abolished out of humanitarianism and humanistic care. I don't know what kind of criminal law lethal injection is in everyone's opinion?