The Secretary of the Florida Department of Corrections had a press conference yesterday regarding changes in lethal injection procedure. Coverage includes these articles by Linda Kleindienst in the Orlando Sentinel and Bill Cotterell in the Tallahassee Democrat. The DoC is rejecting attacks on the drug prescription, which the Drs. Erickson note here is bogus. The changes involve better training and other improvements to deal with only actual problem of making sure the drugs get into the bloodstream.

The department is also going to have the execution administered by a warden and execution team from a different prison than the one the inmate has been in. The reasons for this change are explained in this clarification to the warden's May 9 statement, curiously dated May 8.

The usual objectors make the usual objections. Ms. Kleindienst quotes Mark Elliot of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty saying, "It's absurd that the warden will be determining the depth of consciousness that can only be determined by a professional anesthesiologist." This is a transparent attempt to set up a Catch-22. Require the state to use doctors and forbid doctors to participate. We don't need precise knowledge of depth of consciousness to know that a person is far enough under to not be in extreme pain, which is all that is required.

Also on lethal injection, the AP has this story on an interview with Oklahoma Medical Examiner Dr. A. Jay Chapman, who developed it. There is also video of the interview available through the AP site.