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Responding to a recent federal court ruling suggesting that physician participation could be one way to minimize excessive pain during executions at San Quentin State Prison, the CMA today issued the following statement:

"The CMA has for decades sought to end physician participation in capital punishment, including seeking legislation banning such actions by physicians and other health care professionals."

CMA believes that a physician, as a member of a profession dedicated to preserving life when there is hope of doing so, should not participate in legally authorized executions. Regardless of its method of delivery, capital punishment is not a medical task, does not require medical skills and the use of a physician's medical skills for this non-medical task is inappropriate and a breach of one of the medical profession's most important ethical boundaries. CMA believes that physician participation in capital punishment threatens the public's trust of physicians. This trust is central to the physician-patient relationship.

Physician participation in an execution includes, but is not limited to, the following actions: prescribing or administering tranquilizers and other psychotropic agents and medications that are part of the execution procedure; monitoring vital signs on site or remotely (including monitoring electrocardiograms); attending or observing an execution as a physician; and rendering of technical advice regarding execution."

The statement follows a ruling Tuesday by U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel, who ordered state officials to change the way they administer the fatal dose, or face a delay in death-row inmate Michael Morales' Feb. 21 execution.

Fogel said in a 15-page ruling that San Quentin State Prison officials may either administer fatal levels of sedatives exclusively or have an anesthesiologist present to ensure that Morales is unconscious before they deliver the standard mix of sedatives, paralytic agents and heart-stopping chemicals.

If they want to go ahead without appealing the ruling, state corrections officials must decide whether to accept Fogel's proposal of using sedatives, or select an anesthesiologist. Neither the state attorney general nor Morales' attorneys would say whether they plan to appeal Fogel's ruling. California began executing prisoners by injection in 1996 after a federal appeals court ruled that San Quentin's gas chamber violated the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.