A New Executioner: The Needle

Death by injection is about to be tried at two state prisons

In a private museum in McAlester, Okla. (pop. 18,802) sits a large wooden chair, dusty and unvarnished. Between 1915 and 1980 the chair was a fixture at the state penitentiary a half-mile away, and the 82 convicts who sat in it during those years never got up; they were electrocuted. But in Oklahoma, Texas, Idaho and New Mexico, electric chairs--along with gallows and gas chambers--will soon give way to a far less forbidding piece of lethal equipment: the hypodermic needle. Next week at the prison in McAlester, a hard-drinking drifter and murderer named Thomas Lee ("Sonny") Hays, 45, is scheduled to become the first man in the world to be executed by injection.

The trend arises mainly from a search for a more humane form of capital punishment. Three drugs will flow into Hays to render him unconscious and paralyze his heart: thiopental sodium, pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride. Theoretically, they should make dying no more traumatic than falling asleep.

But the procedure has its dangers. For example, the prisoner might not cooperate. Last December, in a petition urging the Food and Drug Administration to ban the use of drugs for such purposes, Washington, D.C., Lawyers David Kendall and Stephen Kristovich raised a second argument: the drugs have never been tested to verify their safety and effectiveness in an execution. Said the attorneys: "They may actually result in agonizingly slow and painful deaths that are far more barbaric than those caused by the more traditional means." The FDA refused to intervene, maintaining that it should not meddle in state affairs.

Oklahoma had to clear another hurdle: the Hippocratic oath prohibits giving "deadly medicine." Last year the American Medical Association declared that a physician should not participate in executions. Dr. Armond Start, who supervises health care for Oklahoma's 5,000 inmates and was originally designated to insert the needle, took the same stance. That set off an acrimonious debate, highlighted by suggestions that Start resign. Finally the state concluded that the injections could be administered by non-doctors.

Barring any last-minute delays, Hays will be placed on a stretcher on Sept. 14 with his arms, legs and chest strapped. A needle will be inserted into a vein and a harmless salt solution will begin to pass through a tube and into Hays' body. Next, Hays will be carried to an execution room where some 30 people, including the press and up to seven people named by Hays, will witness his final moments. At 12:30 a.m. the executioner--an unidentified volunteer behind a screen--will open a valve that gradually replaces the salt solution with the drugs, increasing the dose until Hays dies. It should take about a minute or two. After another five to eight minutes have passed, making resuscitation futile, Start will pronounce death.

Actually, Hays may earn his place in the record books by a mere 24 hours.Though a court-ordered delay is predicted, Texas authorities in Huntsville are scheduled to give a lethal injection the following day to convicted Killer Charles Milton, 30. Depending on reports from observers at both events, the needle may soon come under consideration as a means of execution for many of the 850 men and women now on the nation's death rows.

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