Lethal injection
Lethal injection, by design, is outwardly ambiguous with respect to what can be seen by witnesses. The 8th amendment of the US constitution proscribes cruel punishment but only the punished can accurately gauge the experience of cruelty. In execution, the inmate is unable to be a witness to their own execution and it falls on the assembled witnesses to decide. Eyewitnesses to execution report very different observations and these differences range from an opinion that the execution was painless to comments that the execution was highly problematic. Post mortem examinations of inmates executed by lethal injection have revealed a common finding of heavily congested lungs consistent with pulmonary edema. The occurrence of pulmonary edema found at autopsy raises the question about the actual cruelty of lethal injection. If pulmonary edema occurs as a consequence of lethal injection, the experience of death may be more akin to drowning than simply the painless death described by lethal injection proponents. Pulmonary edema can only occur if the inmate has heart function and cannot occur after death.