A man sentenced to die in Tennessee later this month says the drugs to be used in his lethal injection won’t give him a humane death. Lawyers for Stephen Michael West are making their case in a Nashville courtroom this week.
Medical experts called by West’s lawyers say the state’s three-drug combination leaves condemned inmates conscious while suffocating to death in searing pain.
The three drugs are intended to first render an inmate unconscious, then halt muscle movement, and finally stop the heart. But the medical specialists testified the only drug of the three that really works is the middle one, a paralytic, which keeps the inmate from crying out while his diaphragm freezes, halting breathing.
Assistant Federal Defender Stephen Ferrell says that’s inhumane, and should be illegal.
“The autopsies of people who have already been executed tend to show that what the state believes happens is not actually happening, and if the anesthesia is inadequate then everyone agrees that the second two drugs can be extremely painful and cause suffocation of a conscious inmate.”
Convicted of the 1986 rape and murder of Wanda Romines and her 15-year-old daughter Sheila, Stephen Michael West is set to die November 30th.
Lawyers for Billy Ray Irick, a death-row inmate set to die a week after West, are backing the lethal-injection challenge.
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