Getting Blood From A Stone-Cold Killer

There's a great deal of talk today on a decision by the Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals to postpone Thursday's scheduled execution of Lawrence Reynolds Jr. He's the Cuyahoga Falls man, otherwise known as inmate #A296121, on Death Row for the New Year's Day 1994 murder of neighbor Loretta Foster.

The appeals court, on a 2-1 ruling, decided more time was needed to give Reynolds' argument the botched execution of fellow Death Row inmate Romell Broom -- because of a two-hour try to find a usable vein to pump the lethal cocktail into Broom's body -- posed enough question to provide a delay. Summit County's prosecutors today appeared resigned to the delay even as the Ohio Attorney General's office was mounting an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Having witnessed nearly a half-dozen executions by lethal injection, I can attest that most appeared to be handled in a professional manner with the necessary injection of a needle into the condemned inmate accomplished with little apparent pain or discomfort. This clearly wasn't the case with Broom, which triggered Governor Strickland to order a temporary halt to Broom's execution. That decision and case now spark the latest strategy used by Reynolds to avoid a trip to the execution chamber in Lucasville, his last measure of defense as arguments for clemency failed.

This particular process hits home for thousands of people everyday; anyone who ever had to push back a sleeve for a blood test has experienced roughly the same kind of medical procedure used in administering execution by lethal injection. For the most part, it is a remarkably successful process; a report published in 2002 by a pair of Mayo Clinic researchers (found here on PubMed, the website of the U.S. National Library of Medicine and National Institutes of Health) reports the failure rate is remarkably low:

Of 833289 encounters, 829723 were successful. Phlebotomies were unsuccessful because patients were not fasting as directed (32.2%), phlebotomy orders were missing information (22.5%), patients specimens were difficult to draw (13.0%), patients left the collection area before specimens were collected (11.8%), patients were improperly prepared for reasons other than fasting (6.3%), patients presented at the wrong time (3.1%), or for other reasons (11.8%). Only 2153 specimens (0.3%) were unsuitable; these samples were hemolyzed (18.1%), of insufficient quantity (16.0%), clotted (13.4%), lost or not received in the laboratory (11.5%), inadequately labeled (5.8%), at variance with previous or expected results (4.8%), or unacceptable for other reasons (31.1%).

Pretty substantial numbers; more than 833,000 "encounters" and fewer than 2200, or 0.3%, were deemed "unsuitable." This report doesn't note, however, how many specimens were listed as successful despite being difficult to draw. To the arguments of lawyers for inmates Broom/Reynolds, the low number doesn't matter because the state has a duty to avoid cruel and unusual punishment. Critics can counter the activity is neither unusual -- it is performed thousands, if not millions of times, daily in hospitals, clinics and labs across the globe -- nor cruel if we are to consider those millions of individuals spiked with a needle everyday.

For the family and friends of Loretta Foster, none of this matters. They've waited for more than 15 years for justice. Their exasperation as what seems to be another last-minute straw grasped by a desperate killer is understandable. The question we asking ourselves is whether all of this is a new legal ploy twister in opposition to capital punishment or a bigger issue: can the state apply death in any form without being cruel, and how do we define cruel?