Word: lethal
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...families of John Wayne Gacy's victims, his death was long anticipated. Just past midnight last Tuesday, the man who tortured and murdered 33 young men and boys during the 1970s would be executed by lethal injection at the Stateville penitentiary in Joliet, Illinois. Justice would be served, swift and clean, as three chemicals were introduced intravenously into his bloodstream. The first drug would knock him out, the second would suppress his breathing, the last would stop his heart. The procedure would take no more than five minutes. But Gacy would take 18 minutes to die. A clog developed...
Opponents of capital punishment charged that the mishap again proved that the death penalty constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. "A lot of people think lethal injection is like putting a dog to sleep," says Kica Matos, research director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund's Capital Punishment Project. "But things still go wrong with all types of executions. It's as gruesome and barbaric as torture." Of 237 executions since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, Matos estimates, 18 have been "botched." Gacy's was among the least painful...
...Although lethal injection has become the most popular method in most states because of its pain-free "humaneness," in eight cases before Gacy's it was anything but. The most heartrending: the execution of Rickey Ray Rector, sentenced to die for murdering a policeman. On Jan. 24, 1992, in Conway, Arkansas, loud moans spilled out of the death chamber as technicians kept Rector tied down during a search for "good" veins. Attendants were about to prepare a "cut-down," in which the arm is sliced open to insert an intravenous catheter, when a vein in his right hand was finally...
...hell, and its commemoration, while less lethal, can be just as bedeviling. For the past eight years, technicians at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum have been meticulously restoring the Enola Gay, the B-29 that in 1945 dropped the first atom bomb, destroying Hiroshima and leading to the end of World War II. An exhibit centered on the front section of the plane's fuselage is scheduled for next year's 50th anniversary of the bombing. But Air Force veterans have seen the 559-page proposal for the show. And they are feeling nuked...
...Skin cancer is now as common as all other cancers combined, says a new study. Up to 1.2 million cases of nonlethal malignancy turn up every year, along with some 32,000 cases of potentially lethal malignant melanoma. The numbers are still on the rise...