Is the use of pentobarbital a humane choice for an execution?

Syndicated to Yahoo! News.

On May 22, Oscar Smith, who was convicted of killing his wife and her two teenage sons, was executed in Tennessee by lethal injection. The state used the chemical pentobarbital only instead of the three-drug cocktail previously employed in its lethal injection protocol.

Lethal injection has been used in 98% of U.S. executions since 1982…

Was the injection of the barbiturate pentobarbital (which is used for all federal executions) a humane choice for an execution? In her first stop in early June in Oak Ridge on her book tour through Tennessee, Corinna Barrett Lain, author of the newly published book “Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection,” compared the injection of pentobarbital to “waterboarding.” Read the full article.