With a history marked by incompetence, political maneuvering, and
secrecy, America's "most humane" execution method is anything but.
From the beginning of the Republic, this country has struggled to
reconcile its use of capital punishment with the Constitution's
prohibition of cruel punishment. Death penalty proponents argue both
that it is justifiable as a response to particularly heinous crimes, and
that it serves to deter others from committing them in the future.
However, since the earliest executions, abolitionists have fought
against this state-sanctioned killing, arguing, among other things, that
the methods of execution have frequently been just as gruesome as the
crimes meriting their use. Lethal injection was first introduced in
order to quell such objections, but, as Austin Sarat shows in this brief
history, its supporters' commitment to painless and humane death has
never been certain.
This book tells the story of lethal injection's earliest iterations in
the United States, starting with New York state's rejection of that
execution method almost a century and half ago. Sarat recounts lethal
injection's return in the late 1970s, and offers novel and insightful
scrutiny of the new drug protocols that went into effect between 2010
and 2020. Drawing on rare data, he makes the case that lethal injections
during this time only became more unreliable, inefficient, and more
frequently botched. Beyond his stirring narrative history, Sarat mounts
a comprehensive condemnation of the state-level maneuvering in response
to such mishaps, whereby death penalty states adopted secrecy statutes
and adjusted their execution protocols to make it harder to identify and
observe lethal injection's flaws.
What was once touted as America's most humane execution method is now
its most unreliable one. What was once a model of efficiency in the grim
business of state killing is now marked by mayhem. The book concludes by
critically examining the place of lethal injection, and the death
penalty writ large, today.
