A new book features some gruesome but illustrative end matter, not to be overlooked
A long-time advocate for the abolition of capital punishment, Professor Austin Sarat, who teaches Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College, is widely regarded as one of the foremost experts on the topic of the American death penalty. Rife as it is with knotty moral implications, Sarat sees capital punishment, its modes and its effects, as a unique and telling lens through which American values and beliefs can be distilled—a sort of moribund litmus test for national identity.
Intended to shock, awe, and dispel ambivalence, Sarat’s latest book, Gruesome Spectacles, is a historical exposé of the long-standing tradition of the death penalty in the United States—from Thomas Edison’s push for electrocution, to the nation’s brief and disastrous flirtation with lethal gas.
Progressing chronologically through the ghastly history of American executions, Gruesome Spectacles renders plain the many gory details and ethical fallacies of death by hanging, electrocution, gassing, and—today’s favored mechanism—lethal injection. Built on a scaffold of exhaustive research, Sarat’s book takes into account nearly 300 executions that were botched between 1890 and 2010—each of which has a dedicated endnote in Appendix B—the grisliest appendix you’ve ever seen (forewarning: this material is not for the faint of heart):
9. June 30, 1900. District of Columbia. Benjamin Snell. Hanging. Snell, an especially heavy man, was nearly decapitated by the drop. The extra-wide rope cut through Snell’s windpipe, carotid arteries, and vertebra, leaving his body hanging only on the muscles at the back of his neck.
See?
Sarat describes capital punishment today as a “hidden reality” of America, a stark one-eighty from the spectacles of yore when hangings were conducted before gasping audiences. Bureaucratized and privatized, modern-day executions are open to only a small audience consisting of the convict’s loved ones and those aggrieved by his or her crime, along with the occasional journalist.
Perhaps an even more obscure reality is that modern technology has done little to eradicate gruesome mishaps during executions. Tulsa World reporter, Wayne Greene, was scandalized by the botched lethal injection he witnessed in the early nineties:
206. March 10, 1992. Oklahoma. Lethal Injection. . . Greene wrote that the execution looked “painful and ugly,” and “scary.” “It was overwhelming, stunning, disturbing—an intrusion into a moment so personal that reporters, taught for years that intrusion is their business, had trouble looking each other in the eyes after it was over.”
It seems logical to assume that lethal injection presents a cleaner, quicker method of execution with a lower rate of failure than the blunt instruments of former eras—but when the facts are brought to bear, this assumption quickly crumbles. Writing in the Providence Journal on the occasion of Dennis McGuire’s protracted execution this past January, Sarat noted that the rate of botched executions is 7 percent higher under today’s regime of lethal injection than it has been under previous methods.
Following his discussion of bungled hangings, twice- and thrice-shocked chair-bound convicts and other disconcerting cases, Sarat meditates on the implications of botched executions in his final chapter, “The Struggle to End Capital Punishment.” Here, in the ultimate chapter, he asks the ultimate questions toward which the book’s entire parade of the macabre is tending; how does a mishandled capital sentence get construed in the media—as a “misfortune” or an “injustice”?; and, perhaps most crucially, if there exists no failsafe method of execution free from torturous mishaps, does the death penalty always carry the risk of constituting “cruel and unusual” punishment?
Related links:
- “I witnessed Ohio’s execution of Dennis McGuire. What I saw was inhumane” The Guardian
- “Death penalty in U.S. spurs Wild West scramble for drugs” USA Today
- “Deciding If Death Row Inmates Get to Know How They’ll Be Killed” The New York Times
- “Should a Defense Lawyer Have to Decide How His Client Should Die?” The Atlantic
- “What's the Best Way to Execute Someone?” Slate
- “Bring Back the Guillotine” Slate
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