Connecticut Bill to prohibit drugs for capital punishment must also prohibit drugs for assisted suicide.

Testimony in opposition as proposed to Proposed SB 430 An Act Prohibiting Certain Conduct Concerning Drugs and Medical Devices Used to Execute the Death Penalty February 10, 2025

Stephen Mendolsohn press conference

By Stephen Mendelsohn

Senator Maroney, Rep. Lemar, and members of the General Law Committee:

Proposed SB 430 constitutes selective indignation with a vengeance. There is no moral reason to prohibit drugs and medical devices used for capital punishment while omitting what are often the exact same drugs and devices used for euthanasia and assisted suicide. I speak as a disability rights advocate who has repeatedly testified here in Connecticut and in other states opposing legislation that, no matter how well-meaning, constitutes lethal disability discrimination.

Medically assisted suicide and euthanasia constitute capital punishment for the “crime” of being old, ill, and/or disabled, with far less transparency or oversight. All of the legitimate arguments against the death penalty—opposition to state-sanctioned killing, the corruption of the medical profession by turning doctors into agents of death, the wrong people dying for the wrong reasons, racial and class inequities, the inability of medical science to guarantee a quick and painless death—apply all the more so to assisted suicide and euthanasia. If the state has any legitimate reason to take any life, it should be the lives of those like Linda Mai Lee (f/k/a Steven Hayes) 1 and Joshua Komisarjevsky who by their murderous actions have forfeited their moral right to live. Connecticut needs to take a strong stand against exposing vulnerable elders and disabled people to an ableist system of state-sanctioned medical killing.

One need not point to Canada’s extremely expansive euthanasia laws, where disabled people are routinely being denied lifesaving medical care and social supports while being offered euthanasia instead, and where euthanasia is now the fifth leading cause of death, to understand why we need to strongly push back. There are far too many documented problems and abuses in U.S. states that have laws permitting medically assisted suicide. People whose sole diagnosis is anorexia nervosa have been deemed terminal and prescribed the lethal dose in both Colorado and Oregon. A woman with early stage dementia, who did not qualify as six months terminal and may not have been mentally competent, died under Oregon’s law after using voluntarily stopping eating and drinking (VSED) to be deemed terminal. If VSED qualifies one for medically assisted suicide, than every adult, and especially those with long-term disabilities, becomes eligible for state sanctioned death.

All three current sponsors of SB 430 are, unfortunately, leading proponents of assisted suicide in Connecticut. Indeed, one of them, Representative Josh Elliott, has openly admitted he wants to pass a “limited” assisted suicide bill only to expand it later. We are witnessing continuous expansion in the several states that have already legalized assisted suicide. In 2024, a state senator in California promoted a bill, SB 1196 to expand that state’s law to non-terminal patients and those with dementia, and to permit lethal injection. A leading sponsor of an earlier assisted suicide bill opposed that new bill merely on tactical grounds as “pushing for too much too soon.” Expansion is not merely a “slippery slope” but a paved road to what Canada now has.

Regarding the specific drugs used for assisted suicide, euthanasia, and capital punishment, it must be noted that historically we are often talking about the same drugs. Barbiturates like pentobarbital and secobarbital have been used for both assisted suicide and capital punishment. When these barbiturates became prohibitively expensive nearly ten years ago, in part due to opposition to their manufacture from opponents of capital punishment, assisted suicide proponents began experimenting with other lethal combinations of drugs. KFF Family News noted:

The first Seconal alternative turned out to be too harsh, burning patients’ mouths and throats, causing some to scream in pain. The second drug mix, used 67 times, has led to deaths that stretched out hours in some patients — and up to 31 hours in one case.

It gets worse. In an article titled “The Complicated Science of a Medically Assisted Death,” Quillette reports on one example of an agonizing death from assisted suicide in Oregon:

Jeff drank the lethal cocktail through a straw. Within 20 minutes he was asleep. Twelve hours later, Ada saw a shadow out of the corner of her eye and looked over. Jeff was sitting up and awake. Then, he started vomiting profusely….

After he awoke, scared and confused, Jeff was admitted to the hospital. When Ada visited Jeff the next day, she found him in the “comfort care” ward. Nurses had given him a mild tranquilizer to help with his nausea and vomiting. Over the next four days he declined rapidly. Ada was with Jeff when he died. As he lay flailing in his hospital bed, yanking at the sheets, she held his hand. “He didn’t die peacefully,” she said, her voice almost breaking. “It was a terrible death.”

The Oregon Death With Dignity Act 2023 Data Summary includes on page 18 one case of someone who took 137 hours—nearly six days—to die after ingesting a combination of digoxin, diazepam, morphine sulfate, amitriptyline, and phenobarbital (DDMAPh-1). I have yet to hear of a case of capital punishment where the condemned prisoner took an agonizing 137 hours to die. If we cannot guarantee a painless death from lethal injections used for capital punishment, how can we possibly claim orally ingested lethal concoctions can guarantee a peaceful death? And conversely, if ingesting these compounded drugs supposedly results in the painless death the assisted suicide lobby claims it does, then why has it never been used in states which retain the death penalty (in the manner that Socrates was forced to ingest hemlock when he was executed)?

Because of the self-administration requirement in U.S. assisted suicide laws, doctors are prohibited from directly hastening death to alleviate suffering when there are complications from the ingested lethal compound. This is a major reason why expansion to active euthanasia is inevitable. In foreign jurisdictions like Canada where there is a choice between lethal injection euthanasia and oral self-administration, doctor-administered euthanasia is nearly exclusive.

Moreover, when an execution is botched, there are witnesses, and we are likely to hear about it. With assisted suicide, there are no required witnesses. Prolonged and agonizing deaths, as well as coercion, are easily covered up. The death certificate is intentionally falsified by law or regulation to list the underlying terminal illness rather than the lethal dose as the cause of death, and natural causes as the manner of death. This last provision caused the Connecticut Division of Criminal Justice to testify in opposition to bills seeking to legalize assisted suicide in our state in 2015, 2019, and 2021, as this provision covers up a potential murder prosecution.

Finally, Absolute Standards in Hamden, which Senator Anwar and Representative Elliott protested against last year, no longer produces pentobarbital for executions, and we know of no other company in Connecticut that does so. The threat is very real and immanent that these same legislators will work to legalize medically assisted suicide and invite Connecticut-based compound pharmacies to compound DDMAPh and other lethal cocktails whose sole purpose is to kill people. We in the disability community have been here at the Capitol nearly every year since 2013 to defend our lives from this menace. Help send a strong message that our lives matter at least as much as convicted murderers on death row.

In short, I request that this committee reconstruct SB 430 to prohibit the manufacture, compounding, sale, testing, distribution, dispensing or supply of any drug or medical device for the purpose of euthanasia or assisted suicide, and not just the death penalty. Unless and until the bill is so revised, it should not move forward.

1. I am cognizant of the transgender community’s opposition to deadnaming. However, when this person committed one of the most heinous crimes in Connecticut history, this is the name that appeared in the news and is what is most familiar to the public.

Stephen Mendelsohn 171 Hartford Road, #19 New Britain, CT 06053-1532

Published with permission.