Doctors were never meant to play an active role in executions, the N.C. Medical Board argues in a brief it filed Wednesday with the N.C. Supreme Court.

The board, which is embroiled in a legal challenge over the way North Carolina carries out the death penalty, contends that the state legislature used specific language requiring doctors to "be present" at executions, but explicitly did not say they should participate.

The role that doctors should play in executions is at the center of a controversy over the use of lethal injections for executions.

Prison officials sued the medical board last year after doctors refused to participate in executions for fear of being disciplined by the board. The lawsuit created a clash between the medical board's ethics policy, which prohibits doctors from participating in executions, and a state law that requires the Department of Correction to have a doctor present.

The legal standoff has resulted in a de facto moratorium on the death penalty in North Carolina.

A lower court judge ruled that the law requires a doctor to "attend and provide professional medical assessment" during executions. That requirement, the judge determined, trumped the medical board's opposition to doctors' participating.

In its appeal, the board noted that the state law requires only that doctors "be present" -- a requirement that goes back as far as 1909, when the official method of execution switched from hanging to electrocution. Even when lethal injection became the method in 1983, the board contends, the requirement for a doctor's presence remained the same.

"The legislature never intended physicians to participate in judicial executions," the board argued.

As a result, the board said, it is required by law to discipline doctors for taking an active role in executions.

"The Medical Board would be abandoning it own mission were it not to enforce and protect the ethics of the medical profession, especially one so central to the medical profession as the preservation of life," the brief states.

Keith Acree, a spokesman for the state Department of Correction, declined to comment because the legal case is still active. Attorneys for the medical board also declined to comment.

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