Death-Dealing Syringes

Charlie Brooks walked into the execution chamber, stretched out on the hospital gurney, and a catheter needle was inserted into a vein in each of his arms. Into the left (on which Brooks had a tattoo reading I WAS BORN TO DIE) would come the drugs; the right catheter was a standby. Extending from each needle was a length of clear plastic tubing that ran through a plywood slat to the executioner's room next door, and there into a standard hospital bag of saline solution.

For about half an hour, only the solution, consisting of sterile salt water used routinely as a medium for drug injections, flowed into Brooks. At about 12:10 a.m., the executioner injected the first of three syringes into the left tube. The dose: two grams of the barbiturate sodium thiopental, about five times the amount given as an anesthetic before surgery.

Brooks died from an overdose of the sodium thiopental, an autopsy revealed, just as prison authorities had intended. But two more syringes were injected as a guarantee of death. The second dose was 100 mg of pancuronium bromide, a synthetic muscle relaxant designed to paralyze Brooks and stop his breathing. The last was enough potassium chloride to stop the heart. When, at 12:16, Brooks was pronounced dead, two-thirds of the potassium chloride remained unused.

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