Adopting lethal injection in India would create deep ethical and practical conflicts for doctors, erode public trust in medicine, and risk inhuman suffering

By Kattamreddy Ananth Rupesh

Medicine has always rested on a single, timeless promise: to preserve life and relieve suffering. At its core is the principle primum non nocere — “first, do no harm” — which defines what it means to be a healer. Yet today, in courtrooms and public debates, a troubling question keeps resurfacing: should medical knowledge be used to make state executions more “humane”?

In a recent hearing of the PIL Rishi Malhotra vs. Union of India, filed in 2017 seeking to replace hanging with lethal injection as the method of executing capital punishment, the court noted that the government is not keeping pace with t

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