Tennessee was about to use a drug called midazolam in an upcoming execution. The evidence explained why multiple inmates in recent years had gasped for air after their executions began.Įventually, Zivot and Edgar found pulmonary edema occurring in about three-quarters of more than three dozen autopsy reports they gathered.īohnert first came across Zivot and Edgar's findings in the summer of 2018, when Edgar testified in Tennessee at a federal court hearing. Lawyers in other states shared autopsies of former clients who had been executed. Maybe it was a fluke? Zivot and Edgar needed more autopsies to be sure. It was a severe form of a condition called pulmonary edema, which can induce the feeling of suffocation or drowning. And he confirmed that Zivot's hunch had been correct - the lungs were filled with a mixture of blood and plasma and other fluids. Zivot didn't mention the lungs at all, to see if Edgar would catch the same aberrations. His colleague Mark Edgar, an anatomical pathologist at Emory, agreed to help. His best guess was that they were filled with fluid - but he needed a second opinion. Many of these lungs weighed twice that, sometimes more. The average human lung weighs about 450 grams.
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