A couple of days ago, reader notablogger and our News Scan picked up the story that the American Board of Anesthesiologists has decided to revoke the certification of any member who participates in executing a murderer by lethal injection.
Nice try, gentlemen. Won't work. Do these people or their lawyers ever look at cases? Maybe not, but they should have a gander at this one, decided a year ago by the North Carolina Supreme Court.
Of course what this is really all about is trying to find some gimmick to make executions impossible -- i.e., to effectively abolish the death penalty without ever having to win the case for abolition with either the electorate or the judiciary.
The Elite used to rule by force. When the Revolutionary War made that plan more, uh, difficult, the Elite has gone to Plan B, namely, rule by bluster. As you would suspect, each has about the same probative value.
The whole argument is malarkey.
Doctors are routinely required to furnish otherwise confidential patient information in response to a subpoena. The carrying out of the law is, so far as I know, uniformly regarded as a function that trumps rules promulgated by professional associations.
If a point be made of it, though, the reason medical ethics don't apply in the executions context is that condemned prisoners are not patients and the doctors in the execution chamber are not acting as doctors. The usual Hippocratic duty to do no harm simply does not apply, because the whole point of an execution is to carry out the order of a court. Doctors are not there to practice any healing science, which is their usual mission, and the mission for which they are properly regulated by professional ethics. They are there essentially as chemical technicians (who will replace them if the state medical boards get feisty).
Doctors sometimes become soldiers, whose mission in combat is not exactly to heal. But no one seriously doubts that doctors can properly do this, because people understand that the doctors are not acting in their normal professional roles, and that the enemy combatants they might wound or kill are not patients to whom they owe any professional duty. The same is true in the execution room (except that the death that occurs there is far less random than those that can occur in combat).
As I say, the whole thing is a gimmick. What will happen if these few medical boards get their way is not an end to executions (although that's what they hope for). What will happen is that the state will go back to a method that is potentially nastier, such as the gas chamber, but that doesn't need a medical technician.
The notion that important matters of broad public policy can be dictated by a professional group consisting of a fraction of one percent of the population is quaint, but ridiculous. Not to mention arrogant. But best not to get started there.
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