Medical ethicists challenge court ruling on lethal injection in Alabama case

Court orders demanding death row inmates to provide "specific, detailed and concrete alternatives" to a state's lethal injection protocol compel those inmates to produce evidence that is impossible to obtain without forcing physicians and other clinicians to violate their medical ethics, according to Harvard bioethicists and legal experts. Such orders, therefore, the experts argue, pose an insurmountable hurdle for inmates seeking alternative methods of execution.