Raven
Birk
10/06/14
Research
Journal 1
Summarize- This article
was questioning the how ethical it is for physicians to administer and or
witness the lethal injection when it comes time for prisoners to had their
death penalty carried out. Technically, it's a direct violation for doctors to
harm their patients under the Hippocratic Oath. Death is considered harm
without any foreseeable benefit under this code making it sound immediately
unethical. However, it is a code
enforced by state governments, the 38 states that still have the death penalty
rarely if ever enforce this for said physicians. Medical knowledge is needed to
administer the lethal injection and it is slightly questionable whether or not
the convicts count as patients. It is becoming an issue for doctors to keep
their identity under wraps as is necessary for their careers because reporters
will try to rat them out. It is also questionable whether or not this is
painful enough (because of inconsistent doses) whether or not this counts as a
cruel and usual punishment to the prisoners.
Critical Thinking-
Prisoners complain about how the injections could be or are painful and
therefore would be cruel and usual punishment. How would they know though? The
injected almost always die. Plus, the previous
options were death by hanging, firing squad, and electrocution so death by a
lethal injection that quickly puts you to sleep and effectively paralyzed your
heart in that drug induced slumber seems pretty humane in comparison. An old
relative of mine has just recently been sentenced to life in prison and I'm not
quite sure how I think of the death penalty in respect to people I know.
Sometimes people do things so awful that it's far safer for the rest of society
if they are just killed but is that humane? Is that the right thing to do? Or
even further down the rabbit hole, is life in prison a more torturous
punishment than death for ones crimes? (These are good, critical questions, Raven, but they don't entirely get at the content of the article. They deal with the issue of the death penalty more broadly. I'd like to see your critical thinking directly tied to the claims made by your sources -- making sure you're dealing with their ideas in stasis. In this case, stasis would entail dealing, for example, with questions of whether prisoners can be patients and whether lethal injection can be seen as undue harm inflicted by doctors.) Back to the doctors that are hired to
administer this toxic concoction, is it really worth the risk of their
professional practice to assist the state in humanely getting rid of their
worst criminals? I agree that some people are too dangerous to be let back into
society but does that mean it's worth bringing down the highest people in our
society just in order to protect itself? Even more, would you really feel
comfortable allowing a doctor to perform their practice on you if you knew that
they actively administered the lethal injection? If we’re being honest with
ourselves, a doctor could easily kill you in so many different ways and in many
cases make it appear to be an accident and walk away clean. What really is the
difference in your personal risk from seeing this doctor who has admintered the
injection? In the doctors’ interests, if
the state ever decided to truly enforce the oath in this respect, how much risk
are they putting their livelihood in by doing this? Do they lose sleep at night
knowing that they've killed people or does it just seem like a job or simply
administering medicine to a patient?
Questions: My critical
thinking opened up a lot more questions for me as it was a lot of me
questioning the perspectives. This
report has opened my eyes to the perspective of the physicians in this
situation and it is something that I'm very curious about and would like pursue
and dedicate more research to while writing this paper. Mostly focusing on the following questions:
what risks are the doctors putting themselves at here? Is the dosage really an
issue at the effectiveness and pain level of this sentence? And does it bother
the doctors that they're killing people? Is death a cruel and unusual
punishment?
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