In moon suits, Fla. doctors carry out executions

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Florida has 381 men awaiting execution. Next up is Mark Dean Schwab, scheduled to die Nov. 15 for the 1992 kidnapping, rape and murder of a child.

Thirty-seven of the 38 states with capital punishment have adopted lethal injection. (Nebraska still uses the electric chair.) Many states use doctors and other medical professionals, though their duties vary.

Some, like Texas, have the doctor simply pronounce death. But Tennessee allows doctors to cut open an arm or a leg to find a suitable vein. Many use doctors because a court has ordered them to. In North Carolina, a debate over whether a doctor must monitor an inmate’s level of consciousness has stopped executions.

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In any case, most states try to shield the doctor’s identity.

Missouri recently passed a law that will allow executioners to sue anyone who discloses their identity. That came after a St. Louis newspaper revealed the name of a doctor who had participated in dozens of executions. It reported that he had been sued more than 20 times for malpractice.

The doctor also said that he was dyslexic and occasionally altered the amount of anesthetic given to inmates.

Missouri officials said that without the law, it would be difficult to find a doctor with the expertise in anesthesia to assist in executions, as a federal judge there has demanded.

Curtain used in at least 2 states
In Alabama and Ohio, a curtain is drawn after the execution so the doctor cannot be seen by the witnesses.

Bill Allen, a professor of bioethics in the University of Florida’s College of Medicine, said he is not sure there is a solution that will satisfy those who want physicians barred from death chambers, because “doctors and medical professionals are the best trained to perform the functions to carry out a lethal injection.”

“It’s a fundamental conflict,” Allen said.