Doctors and other healthcare staff who take any part in executions by lethal injection should be punished by their professional bodies, says the human rights organisation, Amnesty International.

In a report published to mark 25 years of the use of this method of execution, Amnesty says that leading professional organisations should push harder to outlaw the practice. The organisation opposes any form of capital punishment.

The practice is condoned in only six countries. But despite an overall fall in the numbers of lethal injections in four of these, it has become the execution method of choice in the United States, says …