As a practising physician, I have studied the autopsies of executed prisoners in order to better understand how lethal injection actually kills. In July, the prisoner Joe Nathan James Jr was executed by the state of Alabama. The circumstances of that death raise troubling questions that are now sparking an outcry.I know, because I carried out the autopsy that revealed what the state has not.Regardless of how one might feel about the rightness or wrongness of capital punishment, it still must comport with the law and not violate the 8th Amendment of the United States Constitution, which bars “cruel and unusual punishments.” Yet if accounts are true, James was subjected to a three-hour ordeal, as state officials attempted to establish intravenous access without any witnesses present. It is not possible to ask James to report on his experience but his bodily remains can still tell the story and guide us to the truth.
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