According to stories in the Los Angeles Times and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the doctor who helped execute Timothy McVeigh is the subject of 20-plus malpractice suits, has been barred from two hospitals and also has been barred from performing executions in Missouri because of concerns about his reported dyslexia interfering with the job. But the federal government has no problem letting this guy take part in lethal-injection executions.
The newspapers named Dr. Alan R. Doerhoff as the subject of the suits and barring. Last year, a federal judge prohibited Doerhoff from any kind of participation in Missouri executions. Apparently the judge has concerns about a man responsible for "mixing the drugs" that send a person to death all because the doctor reportedly has a wee bit of a problem reading numbers. Doerhoff's job when it comes to executions is to insert the intravenous lines into the death-row subject, monitor levels of consciousness and sign the death certificate, the newspapers reported.
Yes, it would bad if Doerhoff wrote prisoner 69 was executed when it was actually prisoner 96.
It also turns out that the good doctor reportedly failed to inform his bosses at some of the hospitals at which he works about those malpractice suits. For this, he was publicly reprimanded by a state agency. Doerhoff is a member of the execution team at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind.
