Forty years ago the United States introduced a method of execution that has since become a primary method for carrying out capital punishment in the country – lethal injection.
First used in Texas in 1982, lethal injection has since been used to end the lives of over 1,300 death row inmates across the country, with all of the states and the US federal government adopting this execution method.
Lethal Injection Before 1980s
While lethal injection as a method of execution of convicted criminals was adopted near the end of the 20th century, the concept was first proposed almost a hundred years earlier.
In the late 1880s, a doctor from New York named Julius Mount Bleyer suggested using lethal injection as a supposedly more humane alternative to hanging, though his proposal ultimately was not adopted at that time and most states went with the electric chair instead.
Nazi Germany did come to utilize this method later, but it had little to do with due process – rather, the Nazi regime used it to murder prisoners and those it deemed undesirable under the auspices of Hitler’s infamous forced euthanasia program.
Not Quite 1984
Forty-year-old Charles Brooks Jr., a convicted murderer, became the first person to be executed via lethal injection.
The death sentence was carried out on December 7, 1982, at the Huntsville Unit penitentiary in Huntsville, Texas.
By December 2022, some 1,377 prisoners have been executed in the US by states and the federal government, according to data from a non-profit organization called Death Penalty Information Center.
How Lethal Injection is Carried Out
An execution via lethal injection typically involves injecting three chemical compounds via an IV line.
The chemicals, injected one after another in a particular order, are supposed to first render the convict unconscious before killing him either by causing cardiac arrest or by inducing the paralysis of respiratory muscles.
How Humane is Lethal Injection
Lethal injection, which has since been adopted as an execution method by several other countries beside the US, such as China and Thailand, is supposed to be more humane than hanging and the electric chair.
However, just like the latter two , it sometimes cause inmates to suffer in agony due to mishaps during the procedure: not every lethal injection procedure goes smoothly.
One such botched lethal injection execution in 2014 resulted in the convict “breathing heavily, writhing, clenching his teeth and straining to lift his head off the pillow” for about ten minutes after being administered the deadly concoction, according to media reports.
The Death Penalty Information Center even suggested that lethal injection may be the “most botched” of the execution methods where things are estimated to go awry “more frequently than any other method”, with seven out of 19 lethal injection execution attempts in the US this year being botched.
The situation with lethal injection in the United States is further complicated by the fact that many US pharmaceutical companies halted the manufacturing of effective drugs used in this procedure, while the European Union outright banned the export of drugs used in lethal injections.