Lethal injection refers to the practice of injecting a convicted criminal offender with a fatal dose of drugs for the express purpose of executing the subject. The main application for this procedure is capital punishment, but the term may also be applied in a broad sense to euthanasia, and suicide. Lethal injection gained popularity in the twentieth century as a form of execution intended to supplant other methods, notably electrocution, hanging, firing squad, gas chamber, and beheading, that were considered to be less humane.

The humaneness of lethal injection has been debated. It is now the most common form of execution in the United States: every American execution in 2005 was conducted by lethal injection. The concept of lethal injection as a means of putting someone to death was first proposed in 1888 by Julius Mount Bleyer, a New York doctor who praised it as being cheaper and more humane than hanging.

Bleyer's idea, however, was never used. The British Royal Commission on Capital Punishment (1949–53) also considered lethal injection, but eventually rejected it after pressure from the British Medical Association (BMA). In 1977, Oklahoma's state medical examiner, Jay Chapman, proposed a new, 'more humane' method of execution, known as Chapman's Protocol: "An intravenous saline drip shall be started in the prisoner's arm, into which shall be introduced a lethal injection consisting of an ultra-short-acting barbiturate in combination with a chemical paralytic." After being approved by anesthesiologist Stanley Deutsch, Reverend Bill Wiseman introduced the method into the Oklahoma legislature where it passed and was quickly adopted (Title 22, Section 1014(A)).

Since then, thirty-seven of the thirty-eight states using capital punishment have introduced lethal injection statutes. On 7 December 1982, Texas became the first state to use lethal injection to carry out capital punishment, for the execution of Charles Brooks, Jr..

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