"Here was, to my mind, the beginning of a piece of evidence that has been critically absent." "How do we ask an inmate whether or not they experience their own death as cruel?" says Zivot.
Most states use three drugs during a lethal injection: The first is supposed to anesthetize inmates the second paralyzes them the third stops the heart. It also meant that the pulmonary edema was being caused by the first drug given during a lethal injection, since the second drug, a paralytic, stops the inmate's breathing altogether. The froth was a clue: It meant that the inmates were still alive and trying to breathe as their lungs filled with fluid, because froth could form only if air was still passing through the lungs. Their findings are now at the forefront of legal challenges to lethal injection across the country. Joel Zivot (left) and Mark Edgar, of Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, first found evidence of pulmonary edema in inmate autopsies in 2016. And he confirmed that Zivot's hunch had been correct - the lungs were filled with a mixture of blood and plasma and other fluids.ĭrs. Zivot didn't mention the lungs at all, to see if Edgar would catch the same aberrations. His colleague Mark Edgar, an anatomical pathologist at Emory, agreed to help. His best guess was that they were filled with fluid - but he needed a second opinion. Many of these lungs weighed twice that, sometimes more. The average human lung weighs about 450 grams. But as he looked beyond the toxicology reports, something else caught his eye. As an anesthesiologist at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, Zivot specialized in reading these levels. He had received simple instructions: Interpret the levels of an anesthetic in the blood to determine whether the inmates were conscious during their execution.
It was 2016, and the autopsy reports had been given to him by lawyers representing inmates on death row. The language was dry and clinical, in stark contrast to the weight of what they contained - detailed, graphic accounts of the bodies of inmates executed by lethal injection in Georgia. Joel Zivot stared at the autopsy reports.
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