Steve Ford, Staff Writer Maybe the French had it right: If we’re going to execute people, just trust gravity and a heavy blade to lop off their heads.

One thing’s for sure — no doctor would be called upon to determine whether the wretch being decapitated was suffering more than an acceptable level of pain. The guillotine being a slam-bang affair, such niceties would be rather pointless, now wouldn’t they?

In North Carolina, doctors should be so lucky. State law requires a physician’s presence during an execution, and a judge (the veteran Donald Stephens of Wake County Superior Court) recently ruled that the law didn’t mean the physician could get by with just being a passive observer. No need for him to be there lolling around the death chamber if his medical expertise couldn’t be put to use.

Put to use in what fashion? Well, there’s the duty of ascertaining whether the person being pumped full of paralyzing and heart-stopping chemicals has in fact departed this life. Sounds fairly simple. But come to think of it, what if the doctor finds a pulse? That would put our trusty doc in the awkward position of signaling, "Zap him again!"

But the controversy of late hinges on that issue of pain. Stephens concludes, not unreasonably, that the doctor attending an execution should keep a lookout for signs of suffering.

There’s bound to be some discomfort, to use the term favored around doctors’ offices, when they strap you down and poke holes in your arm with the goal of putting out your lights forever. But lethal injection is not supposed to turn into such an ordeal that it breaches the constitutional rule against punishments that are cruel and unusual. In other words, the infliction of death is supposed to be sufficient punishment in itself. That’s why we’ve moved away from execution methods that routinely set people on fire or cause them to asphyxiate in agony.

There are underlying problems with the death penalty in any case when some murderers — maybe they had the money for a first-rate legal defense — are sent off to serve life sentences while others await the needle. And we’ve seen as well that the courts can make mistakes — mistakes that couldn’t be remedied once a condemned inmate’s life was taken. (more…)