Doctors and Lethal Injection

From today's Seattle Times, this article lays out a fascinating ethical dilemma. 

It describes the situation faced by Dr. Marc Stern, who formerly headed the medically program for Washington state's prison population. Stern quit his job when directed to oversee an execution. 

Stern felt the execution violated his ethical obligation as a physician to "first do no harm." Also, The American Medical Association, according to the article, disapproves of physician participation in lethal injections. 

Other medical staff with the Department of Corrections continued to work on the execution that Stern found objectionable, despite Stern directing them not to. 

This raises many interesting issues:

Should a medical doctor be involved with an execution?

Should other medical staff be involved with an execution?

Should a doctor work for a prison system if he/she is opposed to execution?

What would a prison system do without medical staff?

How could a lethal injection possibly be administered without some sort of medical supervision?

Was Stern right to try to impose his ethical concerns onto other staff at the DOC? 

Was Stern right to quit over the execution? 

Yet another example of how murky the world of medical ethics can be. 

Two Executions for Washington State?

Washington state is preparing for a March 13 execution of a man named Cal Coburn Brown.

Brown was convicted of aggravated first-degree murder in 1993 for carjacking a 22-year-old woman, holding her hostage in a hotel for 34 hours, and then raping, torturing, and murdering her. 

This would be a different execution from the one that was scheduled for last December and was postponed due to a stay in the court system. 

That execution, of Darold Stenson, was scheduled to take place on December 3rd and was dramatically stopped on December 2, to be delayed for at least 90 days. (The stay had something to do with the state changing processes for lethal injection without properly informing Stenson and his lawyers.) If rescheduled, it could conceivably put the execution around early March. 

Stetson's execution was to be the first in Washington state since 2001. So, after not having a state-sponsored killing for more than seven years, our state could potentially have two within the same month. 

If this does indeed transpire, it will no doubt prove an occasion for activists on both sides to stand up and shout.

Also, I'd like to repoint you to an excellent radio series our local NPR affiliate, KUOW, did on the way execution works in Washington state (both the logistics of it and how the systems in place function). 

Physicians' Involvement in Executions

In the current issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, there is an interesting discussion about the involvement of physicians in execution and whether it is ethical given that they are beholden to the Hippocratic Oath (first do no harm, etc.). Like most issues of medical ethics, there really is some gray area here, so it's pretty fascinating to mull over. In the Jan. 24 issue, NEJM ran an editorial that recommended physicians not take part in executions. These current letters are in response to that piece.