Medical professionals do not take part in executions. Lethal injection has the vague trappings of a medical procedure, but is fundamentally not one. Prisons even must resort to trickery to obtain the drugs, as pharmaceutical organisations are prohibited ethically and even sometimes legally from selling to them.

By and large I view the death penalty as anachronistic, but as long as it must exist, one gets the impression that firing squads and hangings are a hell of a lot more honest about what it really is.