Cruel and inhumane as defined by who?

The death chamber at the Southern Ohio Corrections Facility in Lucasville, Ohio, is seen through glass from the witness room. The state changed its procedures for lethal injection after it took 19 punctures and more than an hour to kill a man with collapsed veins. (By Kiichiro Sato -- Associated Press)
This is in response to the Washington Posts article titled: Lethal Injection to Get Supreme Test. Doubts of Humaneness Bring Case to High Court. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/22/AR2007112201254.html
I understand the challenge of the use of lethal injection to be on grounds of cruel and inhumane treatment. But being an RN for 26 years, nothing described in this article offers any proof that these events differ entirely from the everyday occurrences in hospitals all over the country. In every hospital, patients are made to endure the occasional ineptitude of Doctors, Nurses and Phlebotomists in performance of everyday routine venipuncture for IV access or blood draw. Most hospitals have a policy of three sticks maximum until one is expected to desist. Patients will always continue to suffer infiltration of IV fluids causing pain and suffering and in the case of caustic chemotherapeutics, significant pain and permanent physical deformity. The difference between a hospitalized, law-abiding citizen and a death-row inmate is that in the end, the patient will have to live with and remember the trauma-usualy minor and self-limiting-whereas the condemned prisoner will die and thus have no permanent memory of the botched if however successful procedure. How does one define as cruel and inhumane a procedure, endured daily by thousands of legitimate patients, when applied to a fraction of the worst of societies offenders? I find this an argument without logic or merit. If in this example, standards of cruel and inhumane can not be applied to the general citizenry, how can they then be applied to a tiny subset of society? From a purely emotional perspective, I am sure very few care that the last moments of life of a person, convicted of a capitol crime, should be painless. It would seem an eye for an eye vengeance still holds a tight reign on our sensibilities; if the cost of executing a criminal is a few moments of pain, whether mild or excruciating, it is well worth the deleterious effect it may have on our humanity.

It is utopian for us to envision a world where people can actually live up to the standards of those few who attempt to protect, to the greatest degree, the rights of the legally condemned. However and possibly unfortunate as it may seem, people are still guided by deep emotional instincts which assisted in our survival before the enlightenment of logic and awareness of others as important. I laud the efforts of the ACLU, even in this attempt at limiting the suffering of all human beings, especially the despicable amongst us. We, as a democratic majority ruled society, are not quite ready for this, but someday, with the continued persistence of these groups, we soon may be. In the mean time, logic mandates that lethal injection poses no cause to believe that it is cruel and inhumane.