the N.C. Medical Board does not have a right to discipline doctors who participate in executions...

the N.C. Medical Board does not have a right to discipline doctors who participate in executions, a Wake Superior Court judge ruled.
Judge Donald Stephens said the state's obligation to have a doctor "attend and provide professional medical assessment" during executions trumps the Medical Board's authority to make sure its doctors are being ethical. The Medical Board has said that doctors who participate in executions could be disciplined, because a doctor's role is to preserve life.
"Although the current effort by the medical board to prohibit physician participation in executions may well be viewed as humane and noble, such a decision rests entirely with (elected officials)," Stephens wrote in his 6-page ruling.
The medical board, which licenses and disciplines doctors in North Carolina, threatened in January to punish any doctor who takes an active role in an execution. State law requires that a doctor be present during a lethal injection, and a federal judge demanded last year that a doctor oversee the process of putting an inmate to death.
Dale Breaden, a spokesman for the medical board, declined to comment on the ruling, saying officials will discuss the details at their next meeting in the middle of October.
Lawyers for the state Department of Correction and the Medical Board, adversaries in a lawsuit over the board's ethics policy, argued for nearly two hours Aug. 29 before Stephens. They could not agree on what lawmakers meant when they said a doctor must be "present" at executions.
The board says lawmakers defined present as "in view" of an inmate. But prison officials say it means that a doctor must monitor an inmate for undue suffering during executions.
In January, the Medical Board passed the ethics policy, allowing doctors to be present for the executions but to take no active role.