Sept 22 (Reuters) - The Supreme Court of Alabama is weighing whether to allow the state to become the first to execute a prisoner with a novel method: asphyxiation using nitrogen gas.
Last month, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall asked the court to allow the state to proceed with gassing Kenneth Smith, who was convicted of murder in 1996, using a face mask connected to a cylinder of nitrogen intended to deprive him of oxygen.
Smith’s lawyers have said the untested protocol may violate the U.S. Constitution’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishments,” and have argued a second attempt to execute him by any method is unconstitutional.
In a reply brief filed with the court on Friday, they called the nitrogen gas protocol “so heavily redacted that it is unintelligible,” and said Smith had not yet exhausted his appeals.
This sounds like a joke but this is the explicit problem: doctors won’t be the ones to do it.
You guys all knew that right? Doctors don’t administer those chemicals for lethal injection. And they won’t be administering gas either. Some po’dunk cop will.
Because doctors take an oath that begins “first, do no harm”. This has forever been the problem of the very notion of “humane execution”, there are no physicians involved. None. At any step.
Know what’s just as effective? Bullets. But we can’t call a firing squad humane with a straight face, and the witnesses remaining are traumatized, including the shooters. That truth exposes the truth of the death penalty. It’s not about justice, but retribution - for the living. They’re lynchings. Violent theatrics. That’s the point.
They shouldn’t be legal, it’s barbaric. But you already said you weren’t for them, so I’m just preaching to the ether.
Doctors do, in fact, participate in executions. In some states, doctors are required to be involved.
The American Medical Association and other professional societies are firmly against doctor participation in executions. But a doctor doesn’t need their approval to practice medicine. They just need a state license. And at least one state explictly protects doctors who participate.
Doctors are not required to take any oath. They are usually given the opportunity at graduation, but it’s a personal choice. Kind of like choosing whether to stand and sing the National Anthem at sporting events, some people will decline and that’s ok.
And the Hippocratic Oath is more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules. After all, it also requires medical schools to waive tuition for the children of doctors. Oh, and it bans physicians from performing surgery, too. Because back then, surgeons and physicians were competitors, not colleagues. Some doctors refuse to take the oath because it is so out of touch with modern medicine.
No, this phrase is not in the Hippocratic Oath. “First do no harm” is a quote from a Victorian physician. It is often quoted in Latin (“Primum non nocere”), which should tell you that it is not found in a Greek oath.
However, the Hippocratic Oath does ban “giving a lethal drug” (which also means physicians can’t participate in euthanasia, yet they sometimes do anyway).