Friday, 01/05/07 Is lethal-injection process humane? Lethal injection method has constitutional problem Somewhere in all the debate over whether the electric chair or lethal injection are humane ways to put an inmate to death, the state should come to the conclusion that the death penalty itself is inhumane. That's unlikely in the court of public opinion, because the death penalty has broad public support in Tennessee. But recent developments that raise constitutional questions about the propriety of the lethal injection method add substantial doubts about whether the protocol, which is used in Tennessee, is an acceptable way to put an inmate to death. A federal judge in San Jose, Calif., ruled last month that the lethal injection method of an execution was unconstitutional because it violates the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. That came along with the decision by Florida Gov. Jeb Bush to suspend executions in his state, after a lethal injection process took 34 minutes to complete, twice as long as normal. The Florida inmate was said to have visibly suffered during the process. One of the selling points of the lethal injection method is that it basically puts the inmate out, as if going to sleep into death. But serious questions have emerged in recent years about that method. While the protocol of a lethal injection usually creates the appearance that the inmate is not suffering, some experts say the protocol only masks what is being felt and that the pain can be excruciating. The decisions in California and Florida should fuel concerns about lethal injections elsewhere. In Tennessee, a death-row prisoner who committed the crime before 1999 can choose between being executed by the electric chair or the more modern method of lethal injection. Robert Glen Coe died by lethal injection in 2000 and Sedley Alley on June 28 last year. They are the only two people to be executed in Tennessee since 1960. Critics of capital punishment have said Tennessee could have the same problems with an execution as occurred in Florida. Tennessee is scheduled to carry out an execution Feb. 22 with inmate Edward Harbison, on death row for a 1983 murder. The Tennessee Supreme Court recently upheld the conviction of Paul Dennis Reid, who is scheduled to die Jan. 3, 2008, pending appeals. Public sentiment is strongly in favor of capital punishment. Currently, 38 states, the federal government and the military allow for capital punishment. But the federal ruling in California suggests the Constitution may have another view of the issue. States across the nation have gone through many methods of executions, and as the lethal injection method shows, there have been attempts to make the process look as humane as possible. So when serious questions arise as to whether a lethal injection is as advertised, it undermines the goal the injection is supposed to achieve. No matter how hard society tries to make the process look as though there is no suffering involved, the methods do not seem to meet the goal.