Who invented the lethal injection machine

Dr Jay Chapman sought to develop a more humane method of execution but miscarriages of justice leave him ambivalent about capital punishment. D r Jay Chapman, the pathologist who invented the lethal injection that has been the dominant execution protocol in the US for 40 years, says he has growing doubts about the death penalty in the wake of mounting evidence of wrongful convictions.

Chapman, 75, said that he had revised his view of capital punishment despite having been the architect of the lethal injection in The forensic pathologist, who still practises in Sonoma County, California, was speaking to the Guardian on the eve of a landmark hearing at the US supreme court in Washington on Wednesday.

In , in Baze v Rees, the justices ruled that the triple lethal injection — the protocol devised by Chapman — was constitutional. As supplies of the lethal drugs have run out, death penalty states have turned to increasingly maverick alternatives to fill the gap.

Some have purchased medicines unlawfully from abroad, others have ordered them from scarcely regulated compounding pharmacies, and many have turned to pharmaceuticals previously unused in death chambers. In the most notorious such incident, the execution of Clayton Lockett in April last year, the prisoner was witnessed to writhe and groan on the gurney and was pronounced dead after 43 minutes. But the eighth amendment guarantees that no one should be subjected to an execution that causes searing, unnecessary pain before death.

He said that its properties were such that it could be taken in relatively large doses before reaching lethal levels. Within days, he recommended a three-drug combination — the sedative sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide as a paralytic agent, and potassium chloride to stop the heart — that became standard throughout the U. But Chapman never set out to fundamentally change the way America puts its inmates to death.

Many prisons are now experimenting with new drugs and new drug combinations while turning to unregulated compounding pharmacies to obtain them.

Almost four decades since his involvement, Chapman, 75, looks back on formulating the first lethal injection cocktail. Below is an edited version of the interview. Bill Wiseman called me one day and asked if I had suggestions about a more humane way that inmates could be executed. This came on the heels of the Gary Gilmore execution [the first death row inmate to be executed after the Supreme Court lifted a four-year moratorium], which was a real media circus.

Our feeling about it was that we put animals to death more humanely than we do people. Of course not. But there was a doctor, Stanley Deutsch, who was an anesthesiologist, and he looked at this protocol. If the drugs were administered appropriately, there was not a single chance that any of these inmates could be aware of what was happening. People have the criticism of, Well, no testing has been done on these drugs. Well, now just what kind of testing do they want?

Do they want someone to go out and take a bunch of prisoners and see how much it takes to execute or what? Jay Chapman, a mostly retired forensic pathologist. While Chapman was tasked with helping to recreate the shooting that led to the teen's death in this case, he's also considered largely responsible for another 1, deaths, according to figures by the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit that tracks issues related to capital punishment.

He denies this. That's because the pathologist devised the first form of lethal injection, which since has informed the way prisons across the country execute death row inmates, including recently in Arkansas. Related: Arkansas executions: The inmates ' last meals. Chapman is widely called the "father of the lethal injection.

At the time, the Supreme Court had just reinstated the death penalty after a yearslong ban, and murderer Gary Gilmore had faced a firing squad in Utah. Chapman initially felt he wasn't qualified. He also worried that getting involved with the issue could have a negative impact on his medical career.

But he says he had spoken with colleagues in Oklahoma about the Gilmore case and the way he died. To create the formula, he says, he proposed a "method that was used commonly every day around the world in inducing anesthesia for surgical procedures. So all it entailed was just carrying that to the extreme by using toxic amounts of the drugs involved. The Chapman Protocol—or the Oklahoma Protocol, as it became known—involved three ingredients: sodium thiopental, an anesthetic "That's the drug that would make an inmate unconscious," Denno says ; pancuronium bromide, a muscle relaxant "It literally paralyzes the inmate," says Denno, who recalls Chapman telling her it was used for the benefit of "the people watching the execution…so the inmate doesn't jerk around or show signs of looking alive when he's actually dying" ; and potassium chloride, which causes cardiac arrest.

Chapman initially recommended only the first two ingredients; in , he recommended that the third ingredient also be used. States began adopting protocols similar to Oklahoma's. Convicted murderer Charlie Brooks Jr. He died on a white-sheeted gurney mattress after praying and telling his girlfriend, who was in the execution room, that he loved her, according to reports.

Lethal injections then went into increasingly widespread use, accounting for 41 of the remaining executions in the s, of the executions in the s and of the since , according to a Death Penalty Information Center database. As of last November, 31 states had the death penalty, according to the center.

Four have issued moratoria on the penalty since Colorado, Pennsylvania, Washington and Oregon. Chapman didn't foresee that the method he inspired would grow so popular. Nor did he want it to do so. In an initial interview, Chapman did not respond much to the assertion that in a way, one might consider him connected to more than 1, deaths, other than to say those people would have faced execution regardless and that he sought "to make the method more humane.

The three-drug combination Chapman recommended was widely used until , when the manufacturer of sodium thiopental stopped making the ingredient.