Official: Ark. won't use 'cut-downs' in executions

[flashl]

By JON GAMBRELL
Associated Press Writer

LITTLE ROCK Executioners in Arkansas will not cut through muscle to find an inmate's veins during a difficult lethal injection procedure, a state prison official said.

A federal court affidavit by Ray Hobbs, a chief deputy director of the Arkansas Department of Correction, said members of a team conducting executions at the state's Cummins Unit would avoid using a technique known as a "cut-down." Federal public defenders said state officials used that method in past "botched" executions, a sign that judges ought to keep stays in place for death-row inmates challenging Arkansas' lethal injection procedures.

Hobbs' affidavit, filed Thursday in federal court, describes a cut-down as making a series of surgical incisions through connective tissue, fat and muscle until an area around a large vein can be found.

Cut-downs "will not be performed during any future lethal injection execution," Hobbs said. "In the event that it become necessary to make an incision for vein access during an execution, such incision would not go through the inmate's muscle tissue and would be made by a licensed physician."

[phillysuse]

1. The next step is for physicians in Arkansas to

put pressure on the State Medical Society so that any physician who participates in an execution loses his or her license.

[norepubsin08]

2. Right on!!!

We are such a barbaric nation...part of the problem is cultural...we have from day one focused on the "me" instead of the "us" It makes us not care about the marginalized and voiceless.

[Angleae]

4. They don't need to.

The reason they use EMTs to do the execution is they can't get a physician to violate their hippocratic oath and perform it themself. There is one doctor present but his only duty is to pronounce death.

[flashl]

5. What is this about?

NC Medical Board appeals execution decision

The North Carolina Medical Board on Wednesday defended its right to punish physicians who participate in executions, arguing in an appeal that the Legislature never intended for doctors to take part.

The board asked the state Supreme Court to reverse a Superior Court judge's decision from September 2007 that determined the board overstepped its authority by threatening to punish physicians for participating in executions.

The medical board said in the appeal it filed Wednesday that it "would be abandoning its own mission were it not to enforce and protect the ethics of the medical profession, especially one so central to the medical profession as the preservation of life."

The board's policy effectively triggered a moratorium on the death penalty in North Carolina, which has not executed an inmate since August 2006.

[DCKit]

3. Rabid animals would do better in charge of the criminal justice system.

I firmly believe that graphic novels based upon the exploits of serial killers are these peoples porn - can't even comprehend how minds like these function.