Barring a last-minute intervention by the courts, California will execute the third death-row prisoner in as many months at one minute past midnight on Monday.
The planned lethal injection at San Quentin prison near San Francisco follows the rejection on Friday by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of a clemency petition on behalf of the murderer Michael Morales. But it has pitted medical professionals against the governor.
In line with a federal court order, an anaesthetist will ensure that Morales has been rendered unconscious by a sedative before being injected with drugs to stop his heart. The order follows an appeal by Morales that California’s lethal injection procedure constituted ”cruel and unusual punishment”. The issue arose in part because of problems with the execution of Stanley ”Tookie” Williams in December when guards took 12 minutes to find a vein. The presence of an anaesthetist is intended to prevent similar difficulties, but it is in conflict with the ethical code governing medical professionals.
”The use of a physician’s clinical skill and judgement for purposes other than promoting an individual’s health and welfare undermines a basic ethical foundation of medicine — first, do no harm,” said Dr Priscilla Ray, who chairs an American Medical Association ethics committee. ”Requiring physicians to be involved in executions violates their oath to protect lives and erodes public confidence in the medical profession.”
The California Medical Association agreed, arguing that it ”has for decades sought to end physician participation in capital punishment”.
Morales’s lawyers appealed to a federal court on Friday arguing that the anaesthetist’s presence ”does nothing to alleviate the substantial likelihood” of ”unnecessary and excruciating pain”.
All five appeals to Schwarzenegger for clemency have now been rejected.
Morales (46) was convicted for the 1981 rape and murder of Terri Winchell (17). His lawyers requested that his sentence be commuted to life without parole, citing good conduct, his remorse, the influence of drugs on his actions and the role of a prison informant in his conviction. The clemency appeal contended that the death penalty was sought because Bruce Samuelson testified that Morales had boasted about the crime in a conversation conducted in Spanish. Samuelson gave his testimony in return for a deal on his own charges. A decade later it emerged that Morales does not speak Spanish.
The trial judge told Schwarzenegger that without Samuelson’s testimony, Morales would not have received the death penalty. But the governor said that judge and jury were aware of Samuelson’s deal, and said he was one of several witnesses at the trial who testified about Morales’s attitude. But Morales’s attorney, David Senior, said: ”For 25 years, he’s shown regret and remorse. We’re not asking for a pardon. We’re asking that his sentence be commuted to life in prison without the possibility of parole.” – Guardian Unlimited Â