As a lawyer and law professor who represents death row inmates, is opposed to the death penalty, and has written on the subject of physician participation in executions, I wholeheartedly concur with Nelson and Ashby's conclusion that professional medical associations should not seek to destroy the careers of doctors who use their medical expertise to prevent the horribly painful botched lethal injection executions we have seen in the past few years. In other contexts (abortion comes to mind), physicians' own values are permitted to dictate whether they participate in controversial procedures about which there is no public consensus. They should be in this case, too.During a lethal injection execution as it is administered in most states, anesthesia serves the same function as of linking the medical system to or conflating it with the judicial system that rendered the sentence. If their position survives all this, they will still not have dealt with the fact that the moral rectitude of capital punishment remains un-established, and physicians' training is for the sole purpose of caring for the ill.
展开▼
