As the great majority of states have moved toward lethal injection as the designated method of capital punishment, a dispute has arisen  --  or, perhaps more correctly, has been manufactured  --  about the proper role of doctors in administering lethal drugs, or in any other way helping to carry out executions.

Since the death penalty is supported by a consensus of public, legislative and judicial opinion, the idea that it could be effectively abolished by state medical boards is quaint  --  or, in less polite language, a gimmick.  This was recently illustrated by the Supreme Court of North Carolina, which held,  http://www.aoc.state.nc.us/www/public/sc/opinions/2009/051-08-1.htm, that the state's medical board had overstepped its authority in declaring its right to impose professional discipline on any doctor who assisted an execution.

Today, the always interesting Sentencing Law and Policy, http://sentencing.typepad.com/, by Professor Doug Berman, notes an article in the Journal of Medical Licensure and Discipline, Vol. 95, No. 3 (2009).  The article concludes that doctors in most states need not fear professional discipline for participating in executions.  Its abstract states, in part:     

The current state of the law suggests... that the role of state medical boards is quite circumscribed, at least in the majority of states with death penalty statutes that appear to contemplate some level of physician participation in executions. In order to further determine the legality of medical board action, a comprehensive study was conducted of the statutes and regulations governing state medical boards in all 50 states.  The study reveals that only a handful of states - and only seven death-penalty states - explicitly incorporate the AMA's ethical guidelines into their own state ethical codes. The study concludes by suggesting that, where doctors who participate in executions are doing so in order to relieve pain and suffering, it is not clear that a state medical board should intervene even in the rare instance when it would be legally possible to do so.