Last week we posted about the current legal proceedings over the constitutionality of lethal injection. On Sunday the LA Times reported on a related situation in North Carolina, where the state medical board in a legal fight over whether it has the authority to bar doctors from taking part in executions (state law requires a doctor be present). From the article:
There has been considerable debate about whether doctors should be present during lethal injections, a conflict sometimes described by doctors as “The Hippocratic Paradox.” On one hand, doctors may be needed to carry out a lethal injection execution so that it is consistent with 8th Amendment prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment. But others say the Hippocratic oath to preserve life rules out their involvement.
A state court judge ruled in March that the medical board didn’t have the authority to keep doctors from participating and the board appealed the decision last week. That March ruling included an assertion by the judge that executions are not a “medical procedure or event.” The LA Times asked Art Caplan and Ross McKinney about that statement:
The judge’s decision “is patently wrong on its face,” said Arthur Caplan, chairman of the medical ethics department at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School.
The reason that prison officials want doctors present at executions is “for their medical expertise,” Caplan said.
Dr. Ross McKinney Jr., director of the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities and History of Medicine at Duke University, said that the intravenous administration of drugs clearly has the trappings of a medical procedure. “It is hard for me to imagine someone saying that a doctor being there and contributing to someone’s death is not a medical procedure that violates the Hippocratic oath,” he said.
“On the other hand,” he said, “I can understand a physician saying the death penalty was justified for some people, thinking lethal injection is more humane than other forms of execution and therefore be willing to participate. . . . To some degree it becomes a political decision, and it gets wrapped up in the entire debate over the death penalty.”