The litigation — especially U.S. District Judge Eli Richardson’s cynical and macabre opinion published November 26 — concerning Harold Nichols’s scheduled execution on December 11 in Tennessee contains elements about the way our legal system operates that evidence not only the death penalty’s depravity, but how it casts an ugly stain on lawyers generally, contributing in making law one of the most hated professions.

Echoing what I wrote about earlier this year in the Memphis Flyer, that the use of pentobarbital in executions is torture, Judge Richardson wrote: “As to the challenge that [Nichols] is making, [Nichols] alleges (and the Court accepts as true) that pentobarbital causes flash (acute) pulmonary edema as it enters the blood stream and passes through the lungs and burns the membranes of the lungs, and that when fluid enters the lungs it causes a drowning sensation akin to waterboarding—‘one of the most powerful, excruciating feelings known to man.’”

But despite this eye-opening judicial finding about the torturous use of pentobarbital, which Richardson stresses later on in his opinion too — writing “The Court (as noted above) accepts as true that [Nichols] is ‘sure or very likely’ to experience the sensation of drowning if he were to be executed by lethal injection” — Richardson nevertheless “tossed” (as The Tennessean described it) Nichols’s challenge to his impending lethal injection. Judge Richardson concluded Nichols was barred by a one-year statute of limitations when the state adopts a new “particular method of execution.”

As The Tennessean explained, Judge “Richardson found that........

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