why are autopsies given to people who are executed?

Question

It seems odd to me that people that are executed are given autopsies. after being given enough chemicals to kill an elephant or having 1500 volts rammed into their flesh what does the state think killed their victims.

Answer 1

for a medical document just to say that the person is dead and was executed.

Answer 2

Who cares why the state does an autopsy. The point is.that a scumbag murderous slime is dead and will never cause a decent citizen any pain or grief. I do not care if the needle going into the arm causes pain. I do not care if it takes "an agonizing" time to die. I want them to have some the pain they inflicted on the victim. If it took one hour for the victim to die, I want the murderer to take 7 hours. Their punishment should be sevenfold.

Answer 3

I can reccomend you to watch The Green Mile movie with Tom Hanks in it....where there's a scene of electric chair execution, where some guards get carried away and the execution is torture...while it could be quick...an up to standards execution...
That's why when they used to executy people on the electric chair they put a wet cloth on their head. Some guards forgot about that, and the defendands got toasted like a slice of bread.

Answer 4

This is probably like the best point ever made on this board! I have never really thought of why unless it is to protect the prison system to check for things that wouldn't occur during the execution. Like if they had been beated and such...Honestly, if you kills someone, you deserve to be beaten and have pineapple shoved up your a** like Hitler on Little Nicky.

Answer 5

Because it isn't enough they take the taxpayers money to kill someone (I am against the death penalty... As Ghandi said "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind"... And as Jesus said "You have heard an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but this is not so!"). As someone else stated, its the beurocrats... It doesn't have to make sense to pass, it just has to be unnessecary.

Answer 6

This one always had sounded stupid to me. It ought to be pretty obvious what they died of. More to the point, who cares what they died of.

Why waste more state or federal money doing autopsies. Doesn't make any sense to me. Anyone with half a brain knows what someone died of when they are executed.

Answer 7

this is not true in all cases,,, some cases the families like to try to find out if something was wrong with the person...
in some cases where there are no one to claim the body, the state may do medical exams and try to find some reason for the crime...

Answer 8

Even in death, you cannot escape a bureaucrat. If they found it wasn't the execution that killed you, would they bring you back to life so they could do it properly?

Answer 9

i am not sure if this is the correct answer for this but i heard somewhere at one point that they were checking to make sure the person didn't suffer extra suffering in death. So they do it to make sure they killed them right ... wierd i know i whish i could remember where i heard it (probably in a movie lol)

Answer 10

Judging by the below, I would assume it is to determine the effects the execution had on the person, i.e., did they suffer and how, what went wrong, what problems were encountered and how can they be avoided in the future, etc.


31. July 8, 1999. Florida. Allen Lee Davis. Electrocution. "Before he was pronounced dead ... the blood from his mouth had poured onto the collar of his white shirt, and the blood on his chest had spread to about the size of a dinner plate, even oozing through the buckle holes on the leather chest strap holding him to the chair."45 His execution was the first in Florida's new electric chair, built especially so it could accommodate a man Davis's size (approximately 350 pounds). Later, when another Florida death row inmate challenged the constitutionality of the electric chair, Florida Supreme Court Justice Leander Shaw commented that "the color photos of Davis depict a man who -- for all appearances -- was brutally tortured to death by the citizens of Florida."46 Justice Shaw also described the botched executions of Jesse Tafero and Pedro Medina (q.v.), calling the three executions "barbaric spectacles" and "acts more befitting a violent murderer than a civilized state."47 Justice Shaw included pictures of Davis's dead body in his opinion.48 The execution was witnessed by a Florida State Senator, Ginny Brown-Waite, who at first was "shocked" to see the blood, until she realized that the blood was forming the shape of a cross and that it was a message from God saying he supported the execution.49

32. May 3, 2000. Arkansas. Christina Marie Riggs. Lethal Injection. Riggs dropped her appeals and asked to be executed. However, the execution was delayed for 18 minutes when prison staff couldn't find a suitable vein in her elbows. Finally, Riggs agreed to the executioners' requests to have the needles in her wrists.50

33. June 8, 2000. Florida. Bennie Demps. Lethal Injection. It took execution technicians 33 minutes to find suitable veins for the execution. "They butchered me back there," said Demps in his final statement. "I was in a lot of pain. They cut me in the groin; they cut me in the leg. I was bleeding profusely. This is not an execution, it is murder." The executioners had no unusual problems finding one vein, but because Florida protocol requires a second alternate intravenous drip, they continued to work to insert another needle, finally abandoning the effort after their prolonged failures.51

34. December 7, 2000. Texas. Claude Jones. Lethal Injection. Jones was a former intravenous drug abuser. His execution was delayed 30 minutes while the execution "team" struggled to insert an IV into a vein. He had been a longtime intravenous drug user. One member of the execution team commented, "They had to stick him about five times. They finally put it in his leg." Wrote Jim Willett, the warden of the Walls Unit and the man responsible for conducting the execution, "The medical team could not find a vein. Now I was really beginning to worry. If you can't stick a vein then a cut-down has to be performed. I have never seen one and would just as soon go through the rest of my career the same way. Just when I was really getting worried, one of the medical people hit a vein in the left leg. Inside calf to be exact. The executioner had warned me not to panic as it was going to take a while to get the fluids in the body of the inmate tonight because he was going to push the drugs through very slowly. Finally, the drug took effect and Jones took his last breath."52

35. June 28, 2000. Missouri. Bert Leroy Hunter. Lethal Injection. Hunter had an unusual reaction to the lethal drugs, repeatedly coughing and gasping for air before he lapsed into unconsciousness.53 An attorney who witnessed the execution reported that Hunter had "violent convulsions. His head and chest jerked rapidly upward as far as the gurney restraints would allow, and then he fell quickly down upon the gurney. His body convulsed back and forth like this repeatedly. ... He suffered a violent and agonizing death."54

36. November 7, 2001. Georgia. Jose High. Lethal Injection. High was pronounced dead some one hour and nine minutes after the execution began. After attempting to find a useable vein for 39 minutes, the emergency medical technicians under contract to do the execution abandoned their efforts. Eventually, one needle was stuck in High's hand, and a physician was called in to insert a second needle between his shoulder and neck.55


37. May 2, 2006. Ohio. Joseph L. Clark. Lethal Injection. It took 22 minutes for the execution technicians to find a vein suitable for insertion of the catheter. But three or four minutes thereafter, as the vein collapsed and Clark's arm began to swell, he raised his head off the gurney and said five times, "It don’t work. It don’t work." The curtains surrounding the gurney were then closed while the technicians worked for 30 minutes to find another vein. Media witnesses later reported that they heard "moaning, crying out and guttural noises."56 Finally, death was pronounced almost 90 minutes after the execution began. A spokeswoman for the Ohio Department of Corrections told reporters that the execution team included paramedics, but not a physician or a nurse. 57


38. December 13, 2006. Florida. Angel Diaz. Lethal Injection. After the first injection was administered, Mr. Diaz continued to move, and was squinting and grimacing as he tried to mouth words. A second dose was then administered, and 34 minutes passed before Mr. Diaz was declared dead. At first a spokesperson for the Florida Department of Corrections claimed that this was because Mr. Diaz had some sort of liver disease. After performing an autopsy, the Medical Examiner, Dr. William Hamilton, stated that Mr. Diaz’s liver was undamaged, but that the needle had gone through Mr. Diaz’s vein and out the other side, so the deadly chemicals were injected into soft tissue, rather than the vein. Two days after the execution, Governor Jeb Bush suspended all executions in the state and appointed a commission “to consider the humanity and constitutionality of lethal injections.”58