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- Britta Slopianka, Axis of Logic
Correspondent in Germany

HARRISBURG—She remembers a doctor tugging on her eyeball, she remembers a burning in her veins. But mostly, Carol Weihrer remembers her desperate mental pleas to God: Get me off of this operating table.

Six years after a botched eyeball surgery, West Virginia’s Weihrer is the unlikely leader of a group opposing an ingredient in the lethal cocktail of drugs administered to death row convicts. Wearing a heavy patch over her right eye, Weihrer yesterday recounted the 1998 surgery, and she was able to do so because she was conscious for the excruciating bulk of it.

She was awake but inert, she said, because of a paralytic drug called pancuronium bromide, which relaxes all voluntary muscles but doesn’t deaden the brain or nervous system. When the anesthetic drugs wore off, the effects of the pancuronium lingered, and she was, in her words and the words of her allies, in a “chemical tomb” that allowed her to experience with clarity her own surgery.

She and some anesthesiologists wonder if those sentenced to death might experience something similar. “I have been there,” Weihrer said as she cried, “except I didn’t die.”

Weihrer spoke yesterday at the first state judiciary committee hearing on a Senate bill amendment, proposed by Rep. Daylin Leach, D-Montgomery, that would outlaw the use of pancuronium-family chemicals as an injection agent in Pennsylvania executions.

Pennsylvania and roughly 30 other states that employ lethal injection to execute prisoners use this approximate mixture: sodium pentobarbital, which renders a patient unconscious, pancuronium bromide, which paralyzes the skeletal muscles, and finally potassium chloride, which eventually stops the heart.

Only recently have doctors begun to explore whether the pancuronium has any useful purpose in administering the death penalty, other than to paralyze a convict and give the impression to execution witnesses that the convict is unconscious and unaware, when in fact he may not be. The drug has the potential to mask human suffering, in the process violating “cruel and unusual punishment” protections afforded in the Bill of Rights.

Leach’s proposal is worth exploring, said Columbia University anesthesiologist Mark Heath, partly because of experiences like Weihrer’s, and partly because of previous research conducted by the veterinary field.

Three years ago, Tennessee made it a crime for veterinarians to use pancuronium when putting an animal to sleep because of the undetected pain a pet may experience.

“Pancuronium deceives witnesses into believing that they are able to make a determination about whether the execution was humane,” Heath said, “when in fact the chemical veil it confers makes it impossible” to make such a determination. And because it’s also impossible to interview the convicts after the fact, no one knows if they experience pain or not.

Kyle Janek, a Texas state senator and anesthesiologist, believes they do not, mainly because the dosage of pentathol—another name for sodium pentobarbital—administered to a death row convict is up to 10 times greater than the dose that would be given to Weihrer or anyone else on an operating table.

“This huge dose makes the chance of awareness so incredibly small as to be nonexistent,” Janek said in written testimony. Hypothetical scenarios involving alert, soon-to-be-executed convicts constitute “junk science,” he wrote.

Heath isn’t so sure, partly because there’s no national consensus on what precise dosages must be administered to the convicts. In some states, pentathol dosages are higher, all but guaranteeing that the convict wasn’t alert for his execution. But in other states, postmortem blood analyses have found lower-than-expected pentathol levels.

A spokeswoman for Pennsylvania’s Department of Corrections said the department doesn’t reveal dosage amounts of its execution chemicals.

(Bill Toland can be reached at btoland@post-gazette.com or 1-717-787-2141.)

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/04239/367967.stm