Nashville News Blog

Tennessee may be about to carry out another execution--the first since federal Judge Aleta Trauger ruled 16 months ago that the slipshod way we perform lethal injections violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. The U.S. Supreme Court may have rendered her decision essentially moot, as the lawyers say, with a ruling in a Kentucky case that seemed to give the green light again to lethal injections around the country.

Lawyers for condemned prisoners say the Kentucky case wasn't a good test. They say there's more convincing evidence that Tennessee's lethal injection procedures are screwed up, and they're fighting to stop this week's execution until higher authorities hear their arguments.  But they're not likely to find a receptive audience at the Supreme Court.

The court's definition of cruel and unusual punishment is a little loose. A near-majority ascribes to the "originalist" school of jurisprudence under which floggings in the public square are probably OK. Maybe we should set higher standards. The fact remains that nothing has been done to correct any of the serious issues that troubled Trauger about what we do here. Mainly, she worried inmates are too likely to suffer what was variously described in court testimony as "excruciating," "terrifying," "horrific," "violent" and "grotesque" pain at the state's hands.

Inmates are given a muscle-paralyzing drug to prevent gasps of pain. If they aren't adequately sedated first--and no one checks to find out under this state's procedures--they would be suffocating and incapable of crying out as a heart-stopping poison courses through their veins. Each drug is pumped from syringes to twist and turn through a Rube Goldberg-type contraption and finally--barring any unforeseen kinks in the machine's tubes--into the prisoner's veins. Overseeing it all is an execution team that's basically untrained. With slight variations, this is the way most states do it.

Gov. Phil Bredesen contends that it would be all but impossible to improve lethal injection procedures to meet the objections of Trauger and other critics.

When Trauger, who is ironically his close friend, made her ruling, the governor was defiant. "This is an execution. It's not a medical procedure," he said, adding somewhat petulantly: "If the Vanderbilt anesthesiology department would come over and perform executions for us, there wouldn't be any issues."

"She's kind of created a catch-22 for us," he said. While Trauger demanded more medical training for the execution team, Bredesen said, "The catch is, people with medical training won't take part in executions."

Given all that, any reasonable person would conclude that we shouldn't perform executions by this method. Instead, if we're going to do it at all, we should give prisoners a single overdose of barbiturate. That's the recommendation of many experts. An obviously much simpler procedure, the so-called one-drug protocol would almost assuredly result in a painless execution, like drifting off to sleep.

But a couple of years ago, Corrections Commissioner George Little vetoed that idea with the blessing of the governor's office, not because it isn't obviously more humane, but because it's "uncharted territory"--as Bredesen said later--and might prompt new legal reviews that could slow the pace of executions in Tennessee.

That means Tennessee will go on executing prisoners in a reckless way. Inmates could very well suffer inhumane deaths without anyone knowing it because of the bizarre, inexplicable way lethal injections are carried out.