By Suzanne Hoholik
The Columbus Dispatch
COLUMBUS, Ohio — When the state carries out a death sentence, intermediate-level emergency medical technicians deliver the fatal drugs to condemned prisoners.
But a Columbus surgeon and longtime opponent of capital punishment contends that these technicians are not allowed to administer the drugs.
The procedure state officials follow during executions states that the lethal drugs should be given by a “person qualified under Ohio law to administer medications.”
But under state law, intermediate EMTs are not authorized to work with these drugs.
“The EMTs are not trained to give these drugs and, in my opinion, there’s no assurance they can do it properly,” said Dr. Jonathan Groner, trauma medical director at Nationwide Children’s Hospital.
“These drugs are way out of their scope, and there is risk of pain and suffering.”
Groner raised the issue in a letter he sent to the executive director of the Ohio EMS Board, of which he is a member.
He said his letter was prompted by the recent testimony of two intermediate EMTs in a federal case filed by an Ohio Death Row inmate challenging lethal injection.
The case, filed in 2004, is pending.
Groner said that if intermediate emergency medical technicians gave these drugs to patients in any other setting, they’d be disciplined by the board.
The EMS board discussed the issue at a meeting last month. The board meets again Wednesday.
Richard Rucker, the board’s executive director, said the issue is not black and white.
“It depends on if they’re operating as EMTs or not,” he said. “EMTs are hired in hospitals and trained to do other things. It’s a gray area that has to be looked at.”
Rucker said he planned to have the board’s attorney research the topic and discuss it further with EMS board members.
There’s a similar debate in North Carolina, where the state medical board has said doctors who participate in the death-penalty cases are violating board rules.
But the North Carolina Department of Correction contends that those rules don’t apply inside the prison system.
North Carolina lawmakers are debating the same topic, said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C.
In Ohio, physicians, nurses and paramedics working under a doctor’s order are allowed to administer these drugs.
But in most of the 35 states that have the death penalty, emergency medical workers insert the IVs and inject the drugs, Dieter said.
They lack the training, he said, to correctly calculate doses of medicines for each individual to be executed, and they don’t know, for example, whether the anesthetic has put the person to sleep.
“What the EMTs are trained to do is how to find a vein, insert a needle and have the drugs flow,” Dieter said.
National physician and nurse groups recommend that their members not participate in capital punishment.
There have been 28 lethal injections administered in Ohio since 1999.
“We have never used any doctors or nurses in the process, and we wouldn’t want to do that because it conflicts with any oath they have taken as it relates to preserving lives,” said Andrea Carson, spokeswoman for the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction.
“We don’t think we’re putting an EMT in a position of conflict.”
Groner disagrees.
“If EMTs in Ohio are using their skill to execute people, I think it defiles the profession.”
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