Controversial California ruling focuses on physician role in execution

Organized medicine groups say physician participation is unethical, but only two states bar the practice entirely.

By Kevin B. O'Reilly, AMNews staff. March 13, 2006.

A federal judge's order last month allowing California prison officials to proceed with a scheduled lethal injection only if an anesthesiologist was present prompted national, state and specialty medical societies to condemn the order and issue stern reminders to doctors about their ethical obligation to not participate in executions.

Two anesthesiologists who agreed to attend the execution of convicted murderer and rapist Michael Morales said they reconsidered upon learning that U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel's order required them to determine that Morales was properly anesthetized and unconscious while prison officials administered paralytic and heart-stopping drugs.

"While we contemplated a positive role that might enable us to verify a humane execution protocol for Mr. Morales, what is being asked of us now is ethically unacceptable," the unidentified anesthesiologists wrote in a statement read by a San Quentin State Prison spokesman.

It is unusual, and perhaps a first, for a judge to order that a physician participate in an execution.

Morales' lawyers convinced Fogel that the lethal injection method might be "cruel and unusual punishment" because a 2005 Lancet study and a number of other executions raised questions about whether prisoners remained unconscious after being anesthetized with the barbiturate sodium thiopental while the paralytic agent pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride were administered. The three-drug regimen is virtually the same in the 37 states that use lethal injection in executions.