It's a complicated world we live in.
I just finished reading a book on being a surgeon (which, by the way, will NEVER be my choice career), and it amazes me how little I know about the healthcare system in this country. I should read more, become educated about insurance and forms and whatever Obama is doing down there in Congress. This pertains to me now, whether I like it or not. Weird.
Well, what did I learn. I learned that doctors cannot assist in administration of the death penalty (AMA rule). Which makes sense and doesn't make sense. Doctors swear and oath to always help their patients... lethal injection is definitely not helpful. But if the legal system agrees to sentence someone super-evil to death, someone has to kill that person. Something I never really thought about - you know, somehow they just sit in a chair and get a lethal injection... all by machine, right? Well, apparently that's not how it works. Someone has to be "responsible" for the death or at least play a role in it. Someone has to place the IV, someone has to watch the cardiac monitor, someone has to make sure they're really dead and pronounce the time of death. In other words, someone has to kill the prisoner. Why does it matter if that person is a doctor or not? I mean, if I was sitting on death row, I sure would hope whoever was hired to kill me knew what he was doing. I wouldn't care if that person was a doctor or not, as long as whoever it was had the intelligence to get the process done quietly and peacefully and in as dignified a manner as possible. It's all you've got left, really, if you're sentenced to death. But the argument is that doctors know too much. Skills that are really really scary if allowed to run amuck. Like really scary. Imagine a doctor who somehow was possessed by the Devil and twisted until he or she was driven to hurt instead of heal. The pain and the suffering that would be caused instead of eased. So doctors must use their powers only for good and (using bad fantasy novels as a guide) in the name of the Light.
But that can leave those on death row in the hands of bumbling idiots.
Yes, the death penalty is cruel and unusual punishment - for prisoners as well as for all the good people forced to assist in the process.