Photograph by Bernd Obermann / Corbis Documentary / Getty Images
Dr. Joel Zivot first began researching the death penalty 12 years ago when it suddenly affected his day job. As an anesthesiologist in the ICU at Emory University Hospital, Zivot frequently used the drug sodium thiopental. But in 2011, the drug disappeared from the market and caused a drastic shortage in ICUs across the country. When Zivot looked into the cause of the shortage, he found the drug was pulled by manufacturer Hospira after they couldn’t promise the European Union—who threatened to ban the export of lethal injection drugs—that sodium thiopental wasn’t used for executions. “I felt outraged that this drug I used to heal could also be involved in [lethal injection],” says Zivot.
He still works in critical care at Emory, but his feelings following that sodium thiopental shortage turned into a second career dedicated to studying lethal injection and its medical effects. For the past decade, Zivot has acted as a medical expert in numerous death penalty cases throughout the South. Legal defense teams seek him out for medical examinations before execution, for expert testimony in court, and, in rare cases, for autopsies to assess a victim’s experience during execution. In his research, Zivot has found that lethal injection victims often die of pulmonary edema, or fluid in the lungs, instead of the drugs stopping the heart, which is the intended, painless cause of death in an execution. Pulmonary edema instead causes a painful experience similar to drowning.
“I’m not an abolitionist of the death penalty, but I’d call myself an agnostic,” Zivot says, “My angle here became that if capital punishment is a technical act, it has to be done technically correct.”
Today, his attention has shifted to a new method of execution, nitrogen hypoxia, that Zivot believes also induces pain for a person on death row. On January 26, Kenneth Smith, an Alabama man convicted in 1988 for a…
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