Lethal Injection And The False Promise Of Humane Execution

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Lethal Injection and the False Promise of Humane Execution

Author : Austin Sarat
Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 1503634515
Total Pages : 138 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (36 download)

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Book Synopsis Lethal Injection and the False Promise of Humane Execution by : Austin Sarat

Download or read book Lethal Injection and the False Promise of Humane Execution written by Austin Sarat and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2022-06-28 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

The Road to Abolition?

Author : Charles J. Ogletree, Jr.
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 0814762247
Total Pages : 386 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (147 download)

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Book Synopsis The Road to Abolition? by : Charles J. Ogletree, Jr.

Download or read book The Road to Abolition? written by Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2009-11-01 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the start of the twenty-first century, America is in the midst of a profound national reconsideration of the death penalty. There has been a dramatic decline in the number of people being sentenced to death as well as executed, exonerations have become common, and the number of states abolishing the death penalty is on the rise. The essays featured in The Road to Abolition? track this shift in attitudes toward capital punishment, and consider whether or not the death penalty will ever be abolished in America. The interdisciplinary group of experts gathered by Charles J. Ogletree Jr., and Austin Sarat ask and attempt to answer the hard questions that need to be addressed if the death penalty is to be abolished. Will the death penalty end only to be replaced with life in prison without parole? Will life without the possibility of parole become, in essence, the new death penalty? For abolitionists, might that be a pyrrhic victory? The contributors discuss how the death penalty might be abolished, with particular emphasis on the current debate over lethal injection as a case study on why and how the elimination of certain forms of execution might provide a model for the larger abolition of the death penalty.

So Long as They Die

Author :
Publisher : Human Rights Watch
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 69 pages
Book Rating : 4./5 ( download)

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Book Synopsis So Long as They Die by :

Download or read book So Long as They Die written by and published by Human Rights Watch. This book was released on 2006 with total page 69 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recommendations. To state and federal corrections agencies - To state legislators and the U.S. Congress. -- I. Development of lethal injection protocols. Oklahoma - Texas - Tennessee - Lethal injection machines - Public access to lethal injection protocols. -- II. Lethal injection drugs. Potassium chloride - Pancuronium bromide - Sodium thiopental - The failure to review protocols. -- III. Lethal injection procedures. Qualifications of execution team - Checking the IV equipment - Level of anesthesia not monitored. -- IV. Physician participation in executions and medical ethics. -- V. Case study: Morales v. Hickman. -- VI. Botched executions. -- VII. International human rights and U.S. constitutional law. International human rights law - U.S. Constitutional law. -- Appendix A: State Execution Methods. -- Acknowledgements.

Death Penalty in Decline?

Author : Austin Sarat
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781439924815
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (248 download)

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Book Synopsis Death Penalty in Decline? by : Austin Sarat

Download or read book Death Penalty in Decline? written by Austin Sarat and published by . This book was released on 2024-05-31 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Life without Parole

Author : Charles J. Ogletree, Jr.
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 0814723993
Total Pages : 346 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (147 download)

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Book Synopsis Life without Parole by : Charles J. Ogletree, Jr.

Download or read book Life without Parole written by Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2012-06-04 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is life without parole the perfect compromise to the death penalty? Or is it as ethically fraught as capital punishment? This comprehensive, interdisciplinary anthology treats life without parole as “the new death penalty.” Editors Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. and Austin Sarat bring together original work by prominent scholars in an effort to better understand the growth of life without parole and its social, cultural, political, and legal meanings. What justifies the turn to life imprisonment? How should we understand the fact that this penalty is used disproportionately against racial minorities? What are the most promising avenues for limiting, reforming, or eliminating life without parole sentences in the United States? Contributors explore the structure of life without parole sentences and the impact they have on prisoners, where the penalty fits in modern theories of punishment, and prospects for (as well as challenges to) reform.

America's Death Penalty

Author : David Garland
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 0814732801
Total Pages : 244 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (147 download)

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Book Synopsis America's Death Penalty by : David Garland

Download or read book America's Death Penalty written by David Garland and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2011-01-25 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past three decades, the United States has embraced the death penalty with tenacious enthusiasm. While most of those countries whose legal systems and cultures are normally compared to the United States have abolished capital punishment, the United States continues to employ this ultimate tool of punishment. The death penalty has achieved an unparalleled prominence in our public life and left an indelible imprint on our politics and culture. It has also provoked intense scholarly debate, much of it devoted to explaining the roots of American exceptionalism. America’s Death Penalty takes a different approach to the issue by examining the historical and theoretical assumptions that have underpinned the discussion of capital punishment in the United States today. At various times the death penalty has been portrayed as an anachronism, an inheritance, or an innovation, with little reflection on the consequences that flow from the choice of words. This volume represents an effort to restore the sense of capital punishment as a question caught up in history. Edited by leading scholars of crime and justice, these original essays pursue different strategies for unsettling the usual terms of the debate. In particular, the authors use comparative and historical investigations of both Europe and America in order to cast fresh light on familiar questions about the meaning of capital punishment. This volume is essential reading for understanding the death penalty in America. Contributors: David Garland, Douglas Hay, Randall McGowen, Michael Meranze, Rebecca McLennan, and Jonathan Simon.

Secrets of the Killing State

Author : Corinna Barrett Lain
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 1479832979
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (798 download)

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Book Synopsis Secrets of the Killing State by : Corinna Barrett Lain

Download or read book Secrets of the Killing State written by Corinna Barrett Lain and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2025-04-22 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lethal injection is nothing like what people think. This is its untold story. In the popular imagination, lethal injection is a slight pinch and a swift nodding off to forever-sleep. It is performed by well-qualified medical professionals. It is regulated and carefully conducted. And it usually provides a “humane” death. In reality, however, not one of those things is true. Secrets of the Killing State pulls back the curtain on this clandestine punishment practice, presenting a view of lethal injection that states have worked hard to hide. Botched executions are a part of this story, but they are just the tip of the iceberg. For all the suffering that we see, there is also suffering that we don’t see. Indeed, the story told here is even bigger than the executions themselves, for behind the scenes is where it unfolds. Fake science, torturous drugs, inept executioners, prison problems, and decades of state secrecy have created an execution method hard-wired to go wrong in countless ways. The story of lethal injection is a story of gross incompetence, law breaking, torturous deaths, and a stunning indifference to the way in which human beings die at the hands of the state. These are the secrets of the killing state—all that we know from litigation files, scientific studies, investigative journalism, autopsy reports, interviews, and scholarship across a number of fields. Death penalty expert Corinna Barrett Lain uses this groundbreaking journey into the dark reality of lethal injection to shine a light on the American death penalty more broadly and show that the state at its most powerful moment is also the state at its worst. We are now over 45 years into the lethal injection era, and most Americans still have no idea what states are doing in their name. It’s time they found out.

From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State

Author : Charles J. Ogletree, Jr.
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 0814769799
Total Pages : 321 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (147 download)

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Book Synopsis From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State by : Charles J. Ogletree, Jr.

Download or read book From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State written by Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2006-05-01 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Situates the linkage between race and the death penalty in the history of the U.S. Since 1976, over forty percent of prisoners executed in American jails have been African American or Hispanic. This trend shows little evidence of diminishing, and follows a larger pattern of the violent criminalization of African American populations that has marked the country's history of punishment. In a bold attempt to tackle the looming question of how and why the connection between race and the death penalty has been so strong throughout American history, Ogletree and Sarat headline an interdisciplinary cast of experts in reflecting on this disturbing issue. Insightful original essays approach the topic from legal, historical, cultural, and social science perspectives to show the ways that the death penalty is racialized, the places in the death penalty process where race makes a difference, and the ways that meanings of race in the United States are constructed in and through our practices of capital punishment. From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State not only uncovers the ways that race influences capital punishment, but also attempts to situate the linkage between race and the death penalty in the history of this country, in particular the history of lynching. In its probing examination of how and why the connection between race and the death penalty has been so strong throughout American history, this book forces us to consider how the death penalty gives meaning to race as well as why the racialization of the death penalty is uniquely American.

The Elgar Companion to Capital Punishment and Society

Author : Benjamin Fleury-Steiner
Publisher : Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1803929154
Total Pages : 425 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (39 download)

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Book Synopsis The Elgar Companion to Capital Punishment and Society by : Benjamin Fleury-Steiner

Download or read book The Elgar Companion to Capital Punishment and Society written by Benjamin Fleury-Steiner and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2024-09-06 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Elgar Companion to Capital Punishment and Society presents a multidisciplinary overview of capital punishment’s influences, processes and outcomes across society. A global range of philosophers, social scientists, legal experts, political theorists and historians critically analyse the trajectory of the death penalty in both retentionist and abolitionist countries, underscoring how state killing remains a crucial issue worldwide.

The Death Penalty as State Crime

Author : Laura L. Finley
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1040001076
Total Pages : 135 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (4 download)

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Book Synopsis The Death Penalty as State Crime by : Laura L. Finley

Download or read book The Death Penalty as State Crime written by Laura L. Finley and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-03-27 with total page 135 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a new perspective on the death penalty in the US, examining capital punishment as state crime or state-produced harm. It addresses the death penalty, showing how the state not only authorizes a system and a practice that tortures human beings, but is also aware of its deep flaws and chooses not to address them. Building on the vast literature on state crime together with case examples and interviews with activists seeking to abolish the death penalty, this book offers a new and innovative critique of state punishment in the US. It draws on a range of issues and topics such as arbitrariness, inadequate counsel, racial bias, mental illness, innocence, conditions on death row, the protocols, and the equipment used for executions. It emphasizes the need for abolition of the death penalty and highlights efforts being made to do so, with a focus on successful elements of abolition campaigns. The Death Penalty as State Crime is essential reading for all those engaged with capital punishment, human rights, and state crime, and will be of interest to criminologists, sociologists, legal scholars and political scientists alike.

Breach of Trust

Author : American College of Physicians
Publisher : Human Rights Watch
ISBN 13 : 9781564321251
Total Pages : 92 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (212 download)

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Book Synopsis Breach of Trust by : American College of Physicians

Download or read book Breach of Trust written by American College of Physicians and published by Human Rights Watch. This book was released on 1994 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Physician involvement in executions

The Cultural Lives of Capital Punishment

Author : Austin Sarat
Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0804767718
Total Pages : 364 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (47 download)

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Book Synopsis The Cultural Lives of Capital Punishment by : Austin Sarat

Download or read book The Cultural Lives of Capital Punishment written by Austin Sarat and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2005-05-27 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does the way we think and feel about the world around us affect the existence and administration of the death penalty? What role does capital punishment play in defining our political and cultural identity? After centuries during which capital punishment was a normal and self-evident part of criminal punishment, it has now taken on a life of its own in various arenas far beyond the limits of the penal sphere. In this volume, the authors argue that in order to understand the death penalty, we need to know more about the "cultural lives"—past and present—of the state’s ultimate sanction. They undertake this “cultural voyage” comparatively—examining the dynamics of the death penalty in Mexico, the United States, Poland, Kyrgyzstan, India, Israel, Palestine, Japan, China, Singapore, and South Korea—arguing that we need to look beyond the United States to see how capital punishment “lives” or “dies” in the rest of the world, how images of state killing are produced and consumed elsewhere, and how they are reflected, back and forth, in the emerging international judicial and political discourse on the penalty of death and its abolition. Contributors: Sangmin Bae Christian Boulanger Julia Eckert Agata Fijalkowski Evi Girling Virgil K.Y. Ho David T. Johnson Botagoz Kassymbekova Shai Lavi Jürgen Martschukat Alfred Oehlers Judith Randle Judith Mendelsohn Rood Austin Sarat Patrick Timmons Nicole Tarulevicz Louise Tyler

Ascent to Power

Author : David L. Roll
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0593186443
Total Pages : 553 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (931 download)

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Book Synopsis Ascent to Power by : David L. Roll

Download or read book Ascent to Power written by David L. Roll and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2024-04-23 with total page 553 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Franklin Roosevelt’s final days through Harry Truman’s extraordinary transformation, this is the enthralling story behind the most consequential presidential transition in US history. When Roosevelt, in failing health, decided to run for a fourth term, he gave in to the big city Democratic bosses and reluctantly picked Senator Truman as his vice president, a man he barely knew. Upon FDR’s death in April 1945, Truman, after only 82 days as VP, was thrust into the presidency. Utterly unprepared, he faced the collapse of Germany, a Europe in ruins, the organization of the UN, a summit with Stalin and Churchill, and the question of whether atomic bombs would be ready for use against Japan. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was growing increasingly hostile towards US power. Truman inherited FDR’s hope that peace could be maintained through cooperation with the Soviets, but he would soon learn that imitating his predecessor would lead only to missteps and controversy. Spanning the years of transition, 1944 to 1948, Ascent to Power illuminates Truman’s struggles to emerge as president in his own right. Yet, from a relatively unknown Missouri senator to the most powerful man on Earth, Truman’s legacy transcends. With his come-from-behind campaign in the fall of 1948, his courageous civil rights advocacy, and his role in liberating millions from militarist governments and brutal occupations, Truman’s decisions during these pivotal years changed the course of the world in ways so significant we live with them today.

Gruesome Spectacles

Author : Austin Sarat
Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0804791724
Total Pages : 284 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (47 download)

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Book Synopsis Gruesome Spectacles by : Austin Sarat

Download or read book Gruesome Spectacles written by Austin Sarat and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-30 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gruesome Spectacles tells the sobering history of botched, mismanaged, and painful executions in the U.S. from 1890 to the present. Since the book's initial publication in 2014, the cruel and unusual executions of a number of people on death row, including Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma and Joseph Wood in Arizona, have made headlines and renewed vigorous debate surrounding the death penalty in America. Austin Sarat's book instantly became an essential resource for citizens, scholars, and lawmakers interested in capital punishment—even the Supreme Court, which cited the book in its recent opinion, Glossip v. Gross. Now in paperback, the book includes a new preface outlining the latest twists and turns in the death penalty debate, including the recent galvanization of citizens and leaders alike as recent botched executions have unfolded in the press. Sarat argues that unlike in the past, today's botched executions seem less like inexplicable mishaps and more like the latest symptoms of a death penalty machinery in disarray. Gruesome Spectacles traces the historical evolution of methods of execution, from hanging or firing squad to electrocution to gas and lethal injection. Even though each of these technologies was developed to "perfect" state killing by decreasing the chance of a cruel death, an estimated three percent of all American executions went awry in one way or another. Sarat recounts the gripping and truly gruesome stories of some of these deaths—stories obscured by history and to some extent, the popular press.

Killing Times

Author : David Wills
Publisher : Fordham Univ Press
ISBN 13 : 0823283518
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (232 download)

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Book Synopsis Killing Times by : David Wills

Download or read book Killing Times written by David Wills and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Killing Times begins with the deceptively simple observation—made by Jacques Derrida in his seminars on the topic—that the death penalty mechanically interrupts mortal time by preempting the typical mortal experience of not knowing at what precise moment we will die. Through a broader examination of what constitutes mortal temporality, David Wills proposes that the so-called machinery of death summoned by the death penalty works by exploiting, or perverting, the machinery of time that is already attached to human existence. Time, Wills argues, functions for us in general as a prosthetic technology, but the application of the death penalty represents a new level of prosthetic intervention into what constitutes the human. Killing Times traces the logic of the death penalty across a range of sites. Starting with the legal cases whereby American courts have struggled to articulate what methods of execution constitute “cruel and unusual punishment,” Wills goes on to show the ways that technologies of death have themselves evolved in conjunction with ideas of cruelty and instantaneity, from the development of the guillotine and the trap door for hanging, through the firing squad and the electric chair, through today’s controversies surrounding lethal injection. Responding to the legal system’s repeated recourse to storytelling—prosecutors’ and politicians’ endless recounting of the horrors of crimes—Wills gives a careful eye to the narrative, even fictive spaces that surround crime and punishment. Many of the controversies surrounding capital punishment, Wills argues, revolve around the complex temporality of the death penalty: how its instant works in conjunction with forms of suspension, or extension of time; how its seeming correlation between egregious crime and painless execution is complicated by a number of different discourses. By pinpointing the temporal technology that marks the death penalty, Wills is able to show capital punishment’s expansive reach, tracing the ways it has come to govern not only executions within the judicial system, but also the opposed but linked categories of the suicide bombing and drone warfare. In discussing the temporal technology of death, Wills elaborates the workings both of the terrorist who produces a simultaneity of crime and “punishment” that bypasses judicial process, and of the security state, in whose remote-control killings the time-space coordinates of “justice” are compressed and at the same time disappear into the black hole of secrecy. Grounded in a deep ethical and political commitment to death penalty abolition, Wills’s engaging and powerfully argued book pushes the question of capital punishment beyond the confines of legal argument to show how the technology of capital punishment defines and appropriates the instant of death and reconfigures the whole of human mortality.

When Law Fails

Author : Charles J. Ogletree, Jr.
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 0814762255
Total Pages : 361 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (147 download)

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Book Synopsis When Law Fails by : Charles J. Ogletree, Jr.

Download or read book When Law Fails written by Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since 1989, there have been over 200 post-conviction DNA exonerations in the United States. On the surface, the release of innocent people from prison could be seen as a victory for the criminal justice system: the wrong person went to jail, but the mistake was fixed and the accused set free. A closer look at miscarriages of justice, however, reveals that such errors are not aberrations but deeply revealing, common features of our legal system. The ten original essays in When Law Fails view wrongful convictions not as random mistakes but as organic outcomes of a misshaped larger system that is rife with faulty eyewitness identifications, false confessions, biased juries, and racial discrimination. Distinguished legal thinkers Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., and Austin Sarat have assembled a stellar group of contributors who try to make sense of justice gone wrong and to answer urgent questions. Are miscarriages of justice systemic or symptomatic, or are they mostly idiosyncratic? What are the broader implications of justice gone awry for the ways we think about law? Are there ways of reconceptualizing legal missteps that are particularly useful or illuminating? These instructive essays both address the questions and point the way toward further discussion. When Law Fails reveals the dramatic consequences as well as the daily realities of breakdowns in the law’s ability to deliver justice swiftly and fairly, and calls on us to look beyond headline-grabbing exonerations to see how failure is embedded in the legal system itself. Once we are able to recognize miscarriages of justice we will be able to begin to fix our broken legal system. Contributors: Douglas A. Berman, Markus D. Dubber, Mary L. Dudziak, Patricia Ewick, Daniel Givelber, Linda Ross Meyer, Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., Austin Sarat, Jonathan Simon, and Robert Weisberg.

Punishment in Popular Culture

Author : Charles J. Ogletree, Jr.
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 1479864218
Total Pages : 316 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (798 download)

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Book Synopsis Punishment in Popular Culture by : Charles J. Ogletree, Jr.

Download or read book Punishment in Popular Culture written by Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2015-06-05 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The way a society punishes demonstrates its commitment to standards of judgment and justice, its distinctive views of blame and responsibility, and its particular way of responding to evil. Punishment in Popular Culture examines the cultural presuppositions that undergird America’s distinctive approach to punishment and analyzes punishment as a set of images, a spectacle of condemnation. It recognizes that the semiotics of punishment is all around us, not just in the architecture of the prison, or the speech made by a judge as she sends someone to the penal colony, but in both “high” and “popular” culture iconography, in novels, television, and film. This book brings together distinguished scholars of punishment and experts in media studies in an unusual juxtaposition of disciplines and perspectives. Americans continue to lock up more people for longer periods of time than most other nations, to use the death penalty, and to racialize punishment in remarkable ways. How are these facts of American penal life reflected in the portraits of punishment that Americans regularly encounter on television and in film? What are the conventions of genre which help to familiarize those portraits and connect them to broader political and cultural themes? Do television and film help to undermine punishment's moral claims? And how are developments in the boarder political economy reflected in the ways punishment appears in mass culture? Finally, how are images of punishment received by their audiences? It is to these questions that Punishment in Popular Culture is addressed.