Capital punishment stumbles ahead in US
by Michael Cook | 11 Aug 2018 |
Three news items this week illustrate the patchwork of capital punishment legislation in the United States.
On Thursday, a 59-year-old man, Billy Irick, was executed in the state of Tennessee for the rape and murder of a 7-year-old, a crime he had committed in 1985.
Tennessee, whose last execution took place in 2009, uses a cocktail of drugs to sedate and then kill the prisoner. Lawyers for prisoners on Tennessee’s death row described this as inhumane, but the challenge was dismissed by the State Supreme Court. A last-minute challenge on grounds of mental incapacity failed in the US Supreme Court in an 8-1 decision. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a scathing dissent: “If the law permits this execution to go forward in spite of the horrific final minutes that Irick may well experience, then we have stopped being a civilized nation and accepted barbarism.”
The state of Oklahoma has not executed anyone for more than three years, partly because it cannot obtain the necessary drugs. After a botched execution in 2014, a three-year moratorium was declared on lethal injections. In 2015 the legislature made nitrogen asphyxiation the preferred method of dispatching prisoners. However, this week it was announced that protocols for this new method had not been finalised; it is unclear when executions will resume. Sixteen inmates on death row have exhausted their appeals and await the dates of their execution.
The state of Nebraska is planning its first execution in 21 years – a 60-year-old man, Carey Dean Moore, who killed two taxi cab drivers in 1979. But a German pharmaceutical company has sued to stop the execution because it will suffer reputational damage if its drug is used. Fresenius Kabi claims that the state obtained two of its drugs through illegal channels.
Adding heat to the debate over capital punishment in the US was a recent move by Pope Francis condemning it as “inadmissible”. He decreed that the Catechism of the Catholic Church, an authoritative reference for official teaching, should be amended to read: “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person”. This came at an awkward time for Nebraska’s governor, Pete Ricketts, a Catholic who is an ardent supporter of the death penalty.
Saturday, August 11, 2018
Every year, about 1.5 million cases of euthanasia take place in the United States. Does this have a negative impact on healthcare workers? Sorry, about 1.5 million cases of cat and dog euthanasia take place. But the question is still relevant. Veterinarians, veterinary assistants and shelter workers experience great stress at having to put animals down.
The emotional connection between the work of human doctors and animal doctors is closer than you might think. Owners often react to a pet’s death with the intensity of grief which appears equivalent to the loss of a beloved relative.
So the moral stress which vets experience is relevant. Suicide amongst vets has been the topic of several studies. “Veterinarians are four times more likely than members of the general population and two times more likely than other health professionals to die by suicide,” according to a 2012 study in the journal of The American Association of Suicidology, Suicide and Life-Threatening Behaviour.
Why? Performing euthanasia day in, day out, also appears to make some vets less able to resist the temptation to commit suicide. The authors of the 2012 study found that “... all else being equal, veterinarians may be more likely than members of other professions to enact a lethal attempt when they desire suicide because their exposure to euthanasia has rendered them less fearful of death."
Aren’t there lessons in these finding which are relevant to doctors who euthanize their patients? Sometimes doctors in Belgium or the Netherlands are quoted as saying that the death they helped was beautiful or peaceful. Could that be bravado masking their own nonchalance about human death?
How many times have we all heard the argument, “You wouldn’t let a dog suffer like this...” Its logic is that if the suffering of animals and humans is essentially the same, they both should be released from suffering in the same way. But if the animal-human parallel works for the patient, why not for the doctor? If we allow euthanasia, surely we can expect the same burn-out rates and the same suicide rates as veterinarians ... at least the same. That should scare us all – especially the doctors who will be responsible.
The emotional connection between the work of human doctors and animal doctors is closer than you might think. Owners often react to a pet’s death with the intensity of grief which appears equivalent to the loss of a beloved relative.
So the moral stress which vets experience is relevant. Suicide amongst vets has been the topic of several studies. “Veterinarians are four times more likely than members of the general population and two times more likely than other health professionals to die by suicide,” according to a 2012 study in the journal of The American Association of Suicidology, Suicide and Life-Threatening Behaviour.
Why? Performing euthanasia day in, day out, also appears to make some vets less able to resist the temptation to commit suicide. The authors of the 2012 study found that “... all else being equal, veterinarians may be more likely than members of other professions to enact a lethal attempt when they desire suicide because their exposure to euthanasia has rendered them less fearful of death."
Aren’t there lessons in these finding which are relevant to doctors who euthanize their patients? Sometimes doctors in Belgium or the Netherlands are quoted as saying that the death they helped was beautiful or peaceful. Could that be bravado masking their own nonchalance about human death?
How many times have we all heard the argument, “You wouldn’t let a dog suffer like this...” Its logic is that if the suffering of animals and humans is essentially the same, they both should be released from suffering in the same way. But if the animal-human parallel works for the patient, why not for the doctor? If we allow euthanasia, surely we can expect the same burn-out rates and the same suicide rates as veterinarians ... at least the same. That should scare us all – especially the doctors who will be responsible.
 Michael Cook Editor BioEdge |  |  |  |
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