American prisoners being executed by lethal injection have been put at risk of excruciating pain because of "incompetence, negligence and irresponsibility" by states using the death penalty, human rights campaigners said today.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) said the US took more care killing dogs than people, and alleged that prison officials were more concerned with how executions looked than protecting condemned prisoners from pain.
Its 65-page report into the procedure said the method was created three decades ago with no scientific research and remained unchanged today. It involves the prisoner being injected with three drugs: the first delivering a massive dose of anaesthetic, the second to paralyse voluntary muscles and the third quickly to cause cardiac arrest.
But HRW said that without adequate or properly-administered anaesthesia, prisoners would be conscious during suffocation caused by the paralytic agent and would feel "fiery pain" from the lethal potassium chloride coursing through their veins.
And the use of the paralytic agent - pancuronium bromide - made it much harder to tell if prisoners were sufficiently anaesthetised, because it prevented them from showing any pain they might be feeling by moving, crying out or even blinking. Corrections officials had, however, resisted eliminating the use of the drug, HRW said.
Jamie Fellner, US programme director and a co-author of the report, said: "Prison officials have been more concerned about sparing the sensitivities of executioners and witnesses than protecting the condemned prisoner from pain. "They are more concerned with appearances than with the reality."
Potassium chloride is so painful that vets' guidelines prohibit its use unless a vet first ensures that the pet to be put down is deeply unconscious, but no such precaution was taken for prisoners being executed, the report said. "The US takes more care killing dogs than people," said Mr Fellner.
"Just because a prisoner may have killed without care or conscience does not mean that the state should follow suit." Lethal injections are used in 37 of the 38 death penalty states in the US and by the federal government.
Last year every execution in America was by lethal injection. HRW opposes all capital punishment in all circumstances and calls for its abolition. It urged death penalty states to suspend execution by lethal injection until they had conducted a review of alternative methods.