John Oliver has taken on the “horrifying” topic of lethal injection in the latest episode of Last Week Tonight.
Just a few nights before the HBO show aired, there was an execution in Georgia, providing Oliver with an impetus to delve deeper.
Oliver admits that lethal injection often goes undiscussed because of its sensitivity and the variance of reasons both for and against the death penalty. Oliver himself admits he is against the death penalty because of its ineffectiveness, its cost, but above all, because “it’s wrong”. He continued: “It’s a wrong, bad thing the government should not be able to do, which kind of makes my first two points irrelevant there. Listing reasons you don’t support the death penalty can feel like listing reasons why you’re not going to fuck your mom.” The host actually ran with the list of incestuous reasons throughout the monologue, bringing up the impropriety several times.
According to a study, Oliver told his audience that about 4% of people who are sentenced to death are actually innocent, “which, in itself, should give us pause about the whole enterprise”. Even so, he is aware people will support the death penalty so, despite his understanding, he says more people pay attention to the method. Coming into use about four decades ago when the electric chair fell out of favor, lethal injections were initially seen as a more humane form of state-sanctioned murder.
When the Louisiana state representative Donald Ray Kennard explained why he voted to switch methods, he explained it was because he had seen photos of prisoners who had been electrocuted and it was, in his opinion, “kind of gross”. Oliver leapt on this deduction, calling it “‘kind of’ an understatement”. “Putting mayonnaise on pizza is ‘kind of gross’. Otherwise cute dogs with large erections are ‘kind of gross’. Frying a human being until their bodies are smoking husks is objectively horrifying!” Even so, the electric chair and lethal injection might be equal in terms of pain, said the host. “Lethal injection was sold as something akin to surgery. A medical procedure in which a doctor helps a person gently go to sleep and they just don’t wake up.” But, he says, “however much we want that to be the case, it just isn’t”.
The procedure is on the outskirts of medicine. The procedure isn’t performed by medical personnel, who refuse to have anything to do with it, as it conflicts with their oath. Those who do perform the injection aren’t necessarily trained to do so. In fact, the entire process excludes medical personnel. “It wasn’t developed by scientists in a lab. It came about when legislators in Oklahoma tried to figure out how to do it and couldn’t get any doctors to work with them for obvious reasons. So they turned to the state’s medical examiner, Jay Chapman, who warned them that he was an expert in dead bodies but “not an expert in getting them that way”, Oliver quoted. “So he wasn’t an expert, just an enthusiast with a can-do attitude for killing people.”
The host then explained the three-step system of lethal injection: first, an anaesthetic, second, a paralytic, which is not for the benefit of the inmate themselves, rather the onlookers, and third and finally, cardiac arrest. But he explained: “The really important thing to understand here is that the second and third drug in this procedure are both, in their own ways, horrifying.”
If the anaesthetic is poorly administered, the person can suffocate, fully aware, and the third drug has been described as fire being poured into veins. So the most important one is often the anaesthetic. But even that has come with its complications. Sodium thiopental, the drug that was once used in lethal injections, is no longer made in the US and is not approved by the FDA for import. But some states have tried to smuggle it in, via shifty means like pharmacies that operate out of gift shops and illegal pill makers. He joked about one case where it was purchased from a London driving school. “That is the most lethal thing to come out of a British driving school since Prince Philip.”
As it turns out, “Lethal injection actually has the highest botch rate of any execution method,” Oliver informed his audience. “Incredibly, in our desire to find a more humane method, we’ve ended up letting amateurs both invent and administer a form of unpredictable torture.”
