THE execution of a Californian man was postponed at the last minute yesterday after two court-appointed doctors refused to help to administer the lethal injection, a move that reignited America’s death penalty debate.

Michael Morales, who has been on death row since 1983 for the rape and murder of a teenage girl, was scheduled to die at 12.01am. But the execution was suddenly put off after the two anaesthetists withdrew, claiming their involvement would violate their medical oath to preserve life.

The involvement of the doctors, which had been ordered by a judge, was the first such case in the US and stemmed directly from research in The Lancet, the British medical journal, last year. The article, published in April, has shaken up advocates on both sides of the death penalty issue in the US because it suggested that some prisoners executed by lethal injection suffered agonising deaths.

Morales’s lawyers, one of whom is Kenneth Starr, the former prosecutor whose investigation of Bill Clinton uncovered the Monica Lewinsky affair, cited the Lancet article last week when they argued in court that death by legal injection violated the US Constitution’s Eighth Amendment prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment.

They said that Morales, 46, might feel too much pain if the sedative he is given, the first of a three-part cocktail of drugs designed to kill him, does not make him sufficiently unconscious before a paralysing agent and the final heart-stopping drugs are administered.

But rather than stay the execution, the judge gave prison officials two options: bring in the doctors to ensure that Morales was properly anaesthetised, or forgo the paralysing and heart-stopping drugs and kill Morales with a huge dose of barbiturates. The state of California agreed to provide two unidentified anaesthetists.

Just hours before the execution time, everything appeared in order. Despite the fierce opposition to medical participation in executions by the American Society of Anaesthesiologists and the American Medical Association, on the ground that physicians take an oath to preserve life, the two doctors are understood to have volunteered to attend the lethal injection procedure.

Then, shortly before the execution was due to take place, the doctors withdrew. They appear to have become alarmed at the details of the judge’s order, in particular a requirement that they intervene in the event that Morales woke up or appeared to be in pain. “Any such intervention would clearly be medically unethical,” they said.

Morales was again due to be executed early today, this time by a fatal overdose of barbiturates. But the delays and confusion increased hopes among death penalty opponents that both public opinion, and that of the courts, was shifting against the death penalty.

Last month an execution in Florida was postponed — with Clarence Hill, the prisoner, strapped to a stretcher in the death chamber — after an intervention by the US Supreme Court. The court refused to rule on whether death by lethal injection constituted cruel and inhuman punishment, but granted Hill a stay on the issue of whether he could pursue that claim in a lower court.

Public support for the death penalty has slipped, from 80 per cent in 1994 to 64 per cent. Last year the Supreme Court ruled that the execution of juveniles was unconstitutional, and juries have become slower to hand down the death penalty.

Morales was convicted of throttling, raping and then killing Terri Winchell, 17, in 1981.

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