A new study published this week in the British medical journal, the Lancet, charges that some prisoners executed by lethal injection might be so inadequately sedated that they are awake enough to suffer agonizingly painful deaths. Researchers who studied blood samples of prisoners after executions found that more than 40 percent contained levels of anesthesia so low that the prisoners might have been conscious during their executions. They also found that executioners in Virginia and Texas, homes to the nation’s busiest death chambers, were not trained to administer anesthesia. The authors of the study called for a moratorium on lethal injections.