It is an assumption but based in a logical understanding of how these particular drugs interact with one another when they are administered in unvarying dosage amounts for each and every inmate. Opponents argue that the thiopental is an ultra-short acting barbiturate that may wear off (anesthesia awareness) and lead to consciousness and an excruciatingly painful death wherein the inmate is unable to express his pain because he has been rendered paralyzed by the paralytic agent.

In other words, it can be argued that they are not covering the bases and death comes eventually no matter what but how painful that is and how long it takes exactly before the inmate is rendered totally incapacitated is not completely certain. Like I mentioned, my experience stems from a veterinarian's office where I worked. That was different though not entirely unrelated. I was injecting one drug and creating a simple overdose of pentobarbital. Not quite as complicated....

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"Thats it then, they will go on double, secret, probation..."

Some of the " botch" jobs that was done, some of the inmates was telling how it felt.

I am not sure how to describe how they explained it. maybe someone else can give you a better explanation.

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this mod needs coffee

Scientists have done studies on bodies of those executed... and measure the levels of the chemicals in their bodies to determine how much or little the patient was paralysed, asleep etc.....

I will see if i can find the link... but some of the findings were nasty :S

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Here you go

Research
In 2005, University of Miami researchers, in cooperation with an attorney representing death row inmates, published a research letter in the medical journal The Lancet. The article presented protocol information from Texas and Virginia which showed that executioners had no anaesthesia training, drugs were administered remotely with no monitoring for anaesthesia, data were not recorded and no peer-review was done. Their analysis of toxicology reports from Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina showed that post-mortem concentrations of thiopental in the blood were lower than that required for surgery in 43 of 49 executed inmates(88%); 21 (43%) inmates had concentrations consistent with awareness. [8] This led the authors to conclude that there was a substantial probability that some of the inmates were aware and suffered extreme pain and distress during execution. The authors attributed the risk of consciousness among inmates to the lack of training and monitoring in the process, but carefully make no recommendations on how to alter the protocol or how to improve the process. Indeed, the authors conclude, "because participation of doctors in protocol design or execution is ethically prohibited, adequate anaesthesia cannot be certain. Therefore, to prevent unnecessary cruelty and suffering, cessation and public review of lethal injections is warranted."

Paid expert consultants on both sides of the lethal injection debate have found opportunity to criticize the Lancet article. Subsequent to the initial publication in the Lancet, three letters to the editor and a response from the authors extended the analysis. The issue of contention is whether Thiopental, like many lipid-soluble drugs, may be redistributed from blood into tissues after death, effectively lowering thiopental concentrations over time, or whether Thiopental may distribute from tissues into the blood, effectively increasing post-mortem blood concentrations over time. Given the near-absence of scientific, peer-reviewed data on the topic of thiopental post-mortem pharmacokinetics, the controversy continues in the lethal injection community and in consequence, many legal challenges to lethal injection have not used the Lancet article.

In 2007 the same group that authored the Lancet study extended its study of the lethal injection process through a critical examination of the pharmacology of the barbiturate thiopental. This study published in the online journal PloS Medicine [9]confirmed and extended the conclusions made in the Lancet article and go further to disprove the assertion that the lethal injection process is humane. To date these two studies by the University of Miami team serve as the only critical peer-reviewed examination of the pharmacology of the lethal injection process. These findings also appear to be further supported by increased reporting of problematic lethal injections in the United States.

(Source Wikipedia!)

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