7 days ago
Tennessee Inmate to Be Executed Despite Ethical Health Concerns
Tennessee is scheduled on Tuesday morning to execute a prisoner who has a heart implant, even as the case has raised ethical concerns that lethal injection without turning off the implant may result in a torturous death.
Lawyers for the prisoner, Byron Black, who was convicted in 1989 of killing his onetime girlfriend and her two young daughters, had already argued that Mr. Black's intellectual disability should exempt him from the death penalty.
But the fact that his heart implant, which functions as both a pacemaker and a defibrillator, will continue to operate during his execution has added another ethical quandary. Mr. Black's lawyers and some medical experts have warned that the device may shock him repeatedly as the lethal drug is injected.
'That's purposes at odds,' said Arthur Caplan, a top bioethicist at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine. 'They're trying to make this guy die, and you have technology attached that's trying to keep him alive.'
Given that Mr. Black is intellectually disabled and has dementia, Dr. Caplan added, Mr. Black may not understand what is going on beyond the searing pain of repeated shocks.
Mr. Black, 69, is scheduled to die by lethal injection at 10 a.m. on Tuesday at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.
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