Foreword
In the late 1970s, lethal injection was adopted by States looking for a humane way to carry out the death penalty on individuals convicted of capital offenses. Recently, however, anti-death penalty advocates have argued that the approach is far from the pain-free, clinical procedure that practitioners claim it to be. In 2008, they brought a case to the U.S. Supreme Court challenging the standard three-drug method of execution in which an inmate is first sedated and then given two drugs that paralyze the body and stop the heart. They contended that unless the first drug is administered properly, the following…
