A killer conference at Fordham

Staring this morning is this conference in New York on lethal injection sponsored by the Fordham Urban Law Journal.  I have the honor to be monitoring a panel on saturday morning, and here is a preview of topics to be covered:

The symposium will address a broad range of issues concerning lethal injection. Some of these issues include: The purpose of punishment and whether lethal injection adequately serves that purpose; the role of doctors in executions; the relationship between state laws governing the euthanasia of animals and the current lethal injection protocols in those states; the role of the Eighth Amendment in addressing these issues; the impact of the recent lethal injection litigation on lawyers, judges, media and the public, and the impact of the litigation on the death penalty debate as a whole.

One of the conference participants is Ty Alper, who has this effective new piece in the Harvard Law and Policy Review titled "What Do Lawyers Know About Lethal Injection?".  It concludes this way:

Putting the state’s litigators in charge of a process to address the constitutional infirmities of that state’s lethal injection procedures is not a recipe for good public policy. Nor does it allow for an appropriate level of public scrutiny of what should be a fully transparent process.