Supreme Court Finds No Evidence of Lethal Injection's Superiority Over Hanging
The Supreme Court of India recently dismissed a petition challenging the statutory prescription of hanging as the method for executing death sentences. A bench comprising Justice Vikram Nath and Justice Sandeep Mehta observed that no concrete scientific material had been presented to establish that lethal injection, involving the intravenous administration of drugs to cause death, is a demonstrably superior or more humane mode of execution compared to hanging.
The Court stated that the available material did not demonstrate any added advantage of lethal injection over hanging. Consequently, the argument advanced by the petitioner, Senior Advocate Rishi Malhotra, asserting lethal injection as a better and more humane method, was deemed unconvincing. Malhotra had contended that intravenous lethal injection offered a more scientific, humane, and painless approach to execution. However, the Court found this submission lacked sufficient scientific or empirical support.
Senior Advocate Meenakshi Arora, representing Project 39A, National Law University Delhi, presented material highlighting the inherent uncertainties and inconsistencies associated with lethal injection. She drew attention to the high rate of botched executions in the United States, citing a record of approximately 276 botched executions out of around 9,000 between 1890 and 2010, which represents a rate of about three percent. Arora also detailed the three-drug protocol commonly employed for lethal injection, which typically includes a barbiturate for inducing unconsciousness, a paralytic agent to halt muscle movement, and potassium chloride to stop the heart.
Arora submitted that this protocol carries a specific risk: if the initial drug fails to render the prisoner fully unconscious, the subsequent paralytic drug could prevent outward physical manifestations of suffering. This could lead to a prisoner experiencing severe pain while appearing externally calm. As an illustration, she cited the February 2024 execution attempt of Thomas Creech in Idaho, where the execution team failed eight times to insert a functioning intravenous catheter, leading to the execution being called off after approximately two hours of attempts.