The Reaper Wears A Hood

I knew it was coming. John Hood weighs in on doctors "attending" executions. He obviously wants the state to get on with it . . . medical ethics be damned.

He's one of those good-ole-boys I was referring to.

Hood's piece is quite the contorted piece of rationalization.

North Carolina’s death-penalty moratorium was the de facto result of intervention by an unelected body, the N.C. Medical Board, that derives its authority to regulate the practice of medicine from the state.

Well, John, I took The Oath before I got that license.

Of course, taking that Oath seriously (as I think my patients would want and expect me to do . . . and I know at least one set of parents is glad that I did) has not served me well in this state.

As an aside, I've been blogging about my horrific experience in my hometown of Asheboro for over two years now. Our state-authorized regulatory bodies have determinedly buried their heads in the sand. These days when "ethics" supposedly matters so much to the big boys in Raleigh, I haven't heard one peep out of Mr. Hood to "condemn" what happened to me.

At an execution, the state clearly has the right to take the murderer’s life. But it does not have the right to torture him, either by imposing excessive pain or by failing to complete the execution swiftly. The presence of a doctor is a guard against those eventualities.

John just doesn't get it (and I am not at all surprised). Once a doctor adjusts or replaces that IV (to speed up the process and "alleviate pain"), he/she has actively participated in doing harm. If the doctor acts to "correct" something he/she sees on a monitor . . . something that hastens the condemned prisoner's death . . . that is doing harm.

The state's "requirement" to have doctors present is a farce . . . as evidenced by the testimony and contortions of the doctors who have "attended" (but not really) these prisoners at their deaths.

I too am frustrated with my Medical Board. I find their "principled" stand now both belated and hypocritical . . . in light of the principles they ignored when, as a young physician in public service to the state, I fell on my sword for ethics.

For almost ten years this Medical Board has stood by, deaf-dumb-and-mute, while I twisted on the sword.

And while I appreciate Hood's frustration with those (liberal tree huggers) "banking on a flimsy technicality to achieve a policy result they could not achieve through proper democratic and legal channels," the solution seems very simple to me.

The state is going to have to find a way for "law enforcement personnel" to execute people that doesn't put a doctor in the middle. There are all kinds of techniques to consider. Most of them are not as clean and "sanitized" as the needle, but I daresay the suffering could kept to a minimum.

If you want to keep it "pretty", I suppose you could just eliminate the paralytic and crank up the mega-sedation. But it's not my place to tell the state how to kill. I'm a doctor, you see.

Besides, I'm sure all the lawyers can figure it out. Knives in the back are their thing.

And John, Judge Stephens was just flat out wrong when he ruled that a bad law trumps medical ethics.

Laws can be changed.

Ethics just are.