​8th amendment

​ Cruel and unusual punishment

( Death by lethal injection)

Punishments should not inflict physical or

mental pain.
After a Prolonged Execution in Ohio,
Questions Over ‘Cruel and Unusual’
By ​ERICA GOODE​JAN. Jan.17, 2014

As the lethal drugs flowed into his veins in the Ohio death chamber, Dennis B.
McGuire at first “went unconscious” and his body was still, his daughter, Amber
McGuire, said Friday.

But a few minutes later, she said, she was horrified to see her father struggling,
his stomach heaving, a fist clenching.

“He started making all these horrible, horrible noises, and at that point, that’s
when I covered my eyes and my ears,” said Ms. McGuire, who watched the
execution on Thursday at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility, near
Lucasville. “He was suffering.”

Mr. McGuire’s execution, conducted with a new and untested combination of

drugs, took about 25 minutes from the time the drugs were started to the time
death was declared. The process, several witnesses said, was accompanied by
movement and gasping, snorting and choking sounds.

It has not been established whether Mr. McGuire was conscious of pain or
whether the drugs that were used were responsible for his prolonged death. But
at a time when the drugs once routinely used in executions are in short supply
and states are scrambling to find new formulas, the execution is stirring intense
debate about the obligations of the state toward those it kills.

Ms. McGuire and her brother, also named Dennis McGuire, said Friday that
they plan to file a federal lawsuit next week alleging that the execution violated
the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.

“We’re mainly just hoping that no other family has to go through what we went
through yesterday,” Ms. McGuire said.

Allen Bohnert, the lawyer who represented Mr. McGuire, called the execution “a
failed, agonizing experiment by the State of Ohio.”

But the family of Joy Stewart, the woman Mr. McGuire raped and murdered in
1989, said in a statement that whatever Mr. McGuire’s suffering, it paled in
comparison with what Ms. Stewart went through at the hands of her killer. “He
is being treated far more humanely than he treated her,” the statement said.

Three decades ago, lethal injection was pioneered as a more humane method of
execution than electrocution or gas. But in recent years, European
manufacturers of previously used drugs like pentobarbital and sodium
thiopental, in response to pressure from groups opposed to the death penalty,
have blocked their sale for use in executions.

Ohio, which had run out of its supply of pentobarbital, used a combination of
midazolam, an anti-anxiety drug in the same family as Valium, and
hydromorphone, a powerful narcotic derived from morphine. A court gave its
approval to the combination, overruling lawyers for Mr. McGuire who had
argued that the drugs could cause “air hunger,” a struggle for breath that, the
lawyers said, could result in “agony and terror.”

But in persuading the court to allow the use of the drugs, Thomas Madden, an
Ohio assistant attorney general, argued that although there are constitutional
protections, “you’re not entitled to a pain-free execution.”

Death penalty opponents said that the shortage of drugs has led to a chaotic
national picture, with individual states trying out different drug formulas,
sometimes with disturbing results. Mr. McGuire’s execution was not the first in
Ohio to inspire controversy: In 2009, the execution of Romell Broom was
halted after executioners struggled for two hours to get an intravenous line to
deliver the drugs. His lawyers argued that a second execution attempt would
constitute cruel and unusual punishment. Mr. Broom is still on death row.

Deborah Denno, a law professor at Fordham University and an expert on lethal

injections, said that a Supreme Court ruling that upheld Kentucky’s use of a
three-drug cocktail for lethal injections in 2008 was based in part on the
uniformity of drug combinations across the states.

But she said, as the drugs have become less available, “That’s no longer the
case.” She added, “This is a very different world in 2014 than it was in 2008.”

In Wyoming, the shortage of lethal injection drugs has led State Senator Bruce
Burns, Republican of Sheridan County, to propose offering a firing squad as an
alternative method of execution. Currently, the gas chamber is the only
alternative available in Wyoming, but the state does not have one. Mr. Burns
said that given the infrequency of executions, a gas chamber is too costly to
maintain. In Missouri, State Representative Rick Brattin introduced a bill on
Thursday to add firing squads as an option. Utah is phasing out its firing squad
option.

Debates about the relative humaneness of different execution methods have

persisted as long as arguments about the death penalty itself. In 1890,
electrocution was substituted for hanging in the belief that it was less painful,
but George Westinghouse and Thomas Edison both fought to keep their
electrical currents out of the death chamber (Mr. Westinghouse lost). Lawyers
for William Kemmler, the first person to die in the electric chair, argued that
the method constituted cruel and unusual punishment.

Jon Paul Rion, a lawyer representing Ms. McGuire and her brother in the
lawsuit, said that the children were following their father’s wishes in bringing
suit.

“Before Dennis was executed he knew that this could be an issue given what the
defense experts had articulated to the court, that exactly what happened in this
case could happen,” Mr. Rion said. “Dennis made his son promise that if in fact
the execution was as painful and disturbing as the experts predicted, he would
make sure” that others would not have to face a similar ordeal.

Douglas A. Berman, a law professor at Ohio State University, said that if the
McGuires did file suit, they would have to prove “by a preponderance of the
evidence that he suffered unnecessary pain.”

That might be difficult, he said, because Mr. McGuire is in no position to testify

and the definition of “unnecessary” is uncertain, “given that state officials were
trying their darnedest to avoid having him suffer unnecessary pain.”

“By my lights, this is a very hard lawsuit to prevail,” he added. “But who
knows?”
Paraphrase of ERICA GOODE​JAN’s “​After a Prolonged Execution in Ohio, Questions
Over ‘Cruel and Unusual”

January 16, 2014

Dennis B. McGuire was injected with an experimental concoction of different drugs that
have never been used before for execution. Because of the lack of the usual drugs used
to execute people on death row, the state of Ohio went in front to court to get
permission to use these different types of drugs in place of the usual ones. During the
execution, McGuire was heard making snorting, gasping, and choking sounds while he
was seen struggling, fists clenched and stomach heaving. The ordeal took a total of 25
minutes. It was not evident McGuire was conscious of pain or if the drug cocktail used
was the cause of the struggle.

The family filed a lawsuit alleging that McGuire suffered cruel and unusual punishment.
McGuire’s family stated that it was McGuire’s death wish to testify if he looked like he
was suffering because he would not wish upon anybody what he, and his family, went
through. Before the execution, McGuire’s lawyers questioned if the drugs would cause
suffocation, which causes “agony and terror.” The Ohio assistant attorney general
argued that no one is “entitled to a pain-free execution.” The victim, Joy Stewart, was
raped and killed by McGuire; Stewart’s family believes that whatever McGuire suffered
during his execution was less painful than what McGuire did to her.

The article is a reflection of the Eighth Amendment/cruel and unusual punishment

because it involves a controversy involving someone being put to death inhumanely.
The dispute is between the family of Dennis McGuire and the Ohio prison system
regarding how they used the cocktail of drugs for execution because it may be an
example of cruel and unusual punishment.