Early next year, the Supreme Court will tackle the question of whether death by lethal injection violates the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. The high court agreed to hear the appeal of two Kentucky inmates suing the state over its three-drug lethal injection procedure, saying it causes unnecessary pain and suffering. Unwillingly caught up in the debate is the AVMA, whose Guidelines on Euthanasia are cited by lethal injection opponents arguing that even veterinarians won’t subject their animal patients to the same deadly cocktail used on condemned criminals.
No one at the AVMA knows which lawyer or journalist is responsible for bringing the Association into the debate, a debate in which the AVMA does not believe it should be involved. But what is known is that shortly after the euthanasia guidelines were published, originally as the 2000 Report on the AVMA Panel on Euthanasia, lethal injection opponents seized on the document to bolster their claim that the method of executing humans results in intense suffering.
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