The answer, experts say, seems to be that no state wants to make the first move. Having proceeded in lock step to adopt the current method, which was chosen in part because it differed from the one used on animals and masked the involuntary movements associated with death, state governments would prefer that someone else, possibly the courts, change the formula first.  “The departments of correction are dug in,” said Deborah W. Denno, an authority on methods of execution at the Fordham University Law School. “There’s safety in numbers. But if one state breaks from that, the safety in numbers starts to crumble.”  “If you change,” Professor Denno continued, “you’re admitting there was something wrong with the prior method. All those people you were executing, you could have been doing it in a better, more humane way.”  In the Baze case, lawyers for John D. Rees, the Kentucky corrections commissioner, said the three-chemical combination was safe and painless and produced a dignified death. Using only a single barbiturate, they said, was untested, could result in distressing and disruptive muscle contractions, and might take a long time. The method is the one most commonly used for pets, sometimes in combination with a sedative.  Lawyers for the Kentucky inmates, Ralph Baze and Thomas C. Bowling, said a barbiturate would bring on fatal cardiac arrest “within a matter of minutes.” They conceded that muscle contractions were possible, but said that inmates were strapped down and that witnesses could be told that the movements did not indicate pain. And they said the three-chemical combination, which is not used in veterinary euthanasia, was itself once untested.  Mr. Baze is on death row for killing a sheriff and a deputy sheriff who were trying to serve him with a warrant. Mr. Bowling is there for killing a couple whose car he had damaged in a parking lot.  Lethal injection protocols nationwide were copied from one developed in Oklahoma in 1977 — the year after the Supreme Court reinstituted the death penalty — based on advice from a medical school professor to a state senator. They call for a short-acting barbiturate to render the inmate unconscious, followed by a paralytic and then a chemical to stop the heart.  If the first chemical works, there is no dispute that the process is quick and painless. If it does not, there is no dispute that the inmate will suffer intense and terrifying pain. But because the inmate is paralyzed, it may not be possible to tell whether the first drug worked.  When Texas was considering whether to adopt the Oklahoma protocol in the late 1970s, the medical director of Texas’ corrections department, Dr. Ralph Gray, consulted a veterinarian in Huntsville, Tex., Dr. Gerry Etheredge.  “I told him,” Dr. Etheredge recalled Wednesday, “that in veterinary medicine when we euthanized an animal most of us used pentobarbital, a general anesthetic, which is very potent and long-lasting, and we overdosed it and everything went smoothly. It was very safe, very effective and very cheap.”  Dr. Gray, who has since died, had only one objection, Dr. Etheredge recalled. “He said it was a great idea except that people would think we are treating people the same way that we’re treating animals. He was afraid of a hue and cry.”  Texas adopted Oklahoma’s three-chemical combination and started using it to execute inmates in 1982.  These days, opponents of that protocol make the opposite argument of the one Dr. Gray feared. They say that death row inmates deserve to be treated at least as well as animals.  Two other states have considered revising the three-chemical combination.  In March, a Florida commission appointed to study lethal injections endorsed the three-chemical combination. But it indicated uneasiness about the second drug in the combination, pancuronium bromide, a paralytic that, used alone, would leave the inmate conscious but suffocating and unable to cry out.  The Florida commission urged the state to explore “more recently developed chemicals” to substitute for the paralytic drug that might “make the lethal injection execution procedure less problematic.”  In May, a California commission issued a report saying it had considered recommending a single drug, which has “the advantages of being simpler to administer and virtually eliminates the potential for pain.” But the commission rejected it because a single-chemical protocol s untested, may result in involuntary muscle movements and might take a long time.  The Tennessee committee saw it differently.  “The primary advantage of the one-drug protocol,” according to its draft report in April, “is that it is much simpler to administer.” It also “has the advantage of eliminating both of the drugs which, if injected into a conscious person, would cause pain,” the report added. “All of the medical experts consulted by the state were very supportive of the one-drug protocol,” it said.  Indeed, Judge Aleta A. Trauger of Federal District Court in Nashville said in a decision in September, “No medical testimony supports the proposition that the one-drug protocol causes any suffering or that it prolongs the pronouncement of death.”  In that decision, Judge Trauger barred the execution of Edward J. Harbison, who is on death row for beating a woman to death in a burglary in 1983. Judge Trauger found that the corrections commissioner was “deliberately indifferent to the plaintiff’s excessive risk of pain” because he rejected the use of a single drug.  That decision is on appeal.  Judge Trauger appeared unimpressed with the testimony of Mr. Little, the corrections commissioner. She said Mr. Little had “at first denied that the protocol committee recommended to him the one-drug protocol” but ultimately admitted that it had.  At a hearing in September, Judge Trauger questioned Mr. Little directly about his statement that political considerations had played a role in his decision to retain the three-chemical combination.  “Did you mean that the governor might look soft on execution or soft on convicted murderers if he went to a one-drug-protocol?” Judge Trauger asked. “He might be pandering to the anti-death-penalty people?”  Mr. Little said no, but he did not elaborate. He did say, according to the notes of Steve Elkins, the governor’s lawyer, that the one-chemical protocol could be a fallback if the courts struck down the three-chemical combination. “Vice versa, no fallback,” the notes said.  A spokeswoman for Mr. Little said he had no comment beyond what he had said in court. A spokeswoman for the attorney general declined to comment, citing the pending litigation.  Some experts on executions say the debate over which chemicals to use is the wrong one. States have adopted a process that appears humane because it looks like medical treatment, Professor Denno said. But looks can be deceiving, she added.  “To me,” Professor Denno said, “the firing squad is the most humane and perceived to be the most brutal.”  A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: States Hesitate To Lead Change On Executions. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Why have states clung to an execution method with the potential to inflict pain when a simpler one is available?