by Pauline Vu, Stateline.org Staff Writer

After 897 executions by lethal injection over the past 25 years, the role of doctors in carrying out the death penalty is surfacing as the latest ethical issue to force a re-examination of capital punishment in the United States.

A conflict between medical ethics and court orders that a doctor must participate in lethal injections has halted executions in California, Missouri and North Carolina. But the ethical issue raised by doctors in the death chamber lurks beneath the surface in most of the 37 capital-punishment states that sanction chemical execution, a mode of death also facing separate constitutional challenges over whether it unduly inflicts pain on prisoners.

The American Medical Association is adamant that it is a violation of medical ethics for doctors to participate in, or even be present at, executions. But recent court rulings have called for people with medical expertise to assist in executions by mixing and injecting the lethal drugs or monitoring the inmate’s vital signs.

“That’s the conundrum, right? The people who are best able to ensure that the Eighth Amendment against cruel and unusual punishment is not going to be violated are the people who want to have nothing to do with this,” said Deborah Denno, a professor at Fordham University School of Law and a capital-punishment expert.