Nathan: Welcome back to Little Rock Public Radio. I'm Nathan Treece. I'm here today with Corinna Barrett Lain, professor of law at the University of Richmond School of Law and author of the book “Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection.” Welcome, Corinna.
Corinna: Thanks. It's nice to be here, Nathan.
Nathan: So, first of all, let's start off. Just tell me what brought you to write this book.
Corinna: Well, I'm a death penalty researcher for nearly two decades now. And this project started with a research question, which was, ‘Why are states so bad at lethal injection? You know, why am I seeing three-hour executions and autopsies with 18 puncture wounds?’
Nathan: And so that led you here. The book covers the practice of executions via lethal injection. And that's over the last 45 years. So it covers a lot of ground. But let's start at the beginning. Can you tell us a little bit about the origins of the method? What led to it being adopted as the standard?
Corinna: Sure. So lethal injection was invented in 1977, and the historical context is actually pretty important. The Supreme Court struck down the death penalty in 1972 as it was then practiced, and then brought it back in 1976. So 1976 marks what we call the modern era of capital punishment. And in 1976, the country had not seen an execution for ten years. Legislators were very worried about the public's reaction to this sort of state violence that execution methods at the time entailed. All we had were the electric chair and death by the gas chamber, both of which are just gruesome deaths. And most people don't know this, but at the time, a federal court had recognized a First Amendment right to televise executions. Now, it wouldn't last, but nobody could have known that. And so legislators were very, very worried about what this would be like. I quote one who says, “Well, we can't have an electrocution in someone's living room.” So they're very concerned about this. They're then thinking, well, what about a death by drugs? Fast forward to Oklahoma in 1977, and one of the legislators asks the state medical examiner, Dr. Jay Chapman. And Chapman refers to himself as an expert in dead bodies, but not in how to get them that way. But still, he comes up with the three-drug protocol. And so, you know, I was very curious, like, how did he come up with the drugs? And I found an interview where he said, “I didn't do any research. I just thought about what might be useful.” He said you wanted two drugs. So if one, you know, didn't kill him, the other would. And the interviewer said, “Well, why did you add a third drug?” And he said, “Why not? Why does it matter why I chose it?” …And that is how we got here.
Nathan: That's something that, you know, is a little bit shocking reading the book, to say the least. Uh, to read how little oversight there was, and to some extent still is, considering these executions. Um, what would you say is the driving misconception behind the method of execution we know as lethal injection?
Corinna: I think the main one is that people think this is a medicalized execution method where people just fall into a forever sleep. And when you think about it, you know, it's all stagecraft. I thought there were doctors that were actually injecting the medicines. Not actually non-medical prison guards. But I think it all revolves around this aura of medicalization and a sense that there's care and competence that goes with it.
Nathan: And you outline in the book some of the problems behind that, you know, mismatched medical equipment, things like the training, which is basically on the job, and the fact that there's no national standard. It's mostly just patchwork state by state. Thinking about that, just this year, we here in Arkansas, the state legislature adopted hypoxia by nitrogen gas as an option for executions. And we kind of set that up following the examples of three other states. So I'm seeing there are some parallels with how we get into lethal injection versus nitrogen gas. How does that method compare to lethal injection?
Corinna: I think, really, history is repeating itself. Frankly, what we see with nitrogen gas is that at the very beginning, the first state to adopt nitrogen gas was Oklahoma. The other states followed Oklahoma. And what the legislators, the sponsors of the legislation in Oklahoma, said is, and I'm quoting them, “It's fast. It's painless. You just sit there, a few minutes later, and you're dead. It's foolproof.” But we are gassing people to death. And I think it's very important that people understand that. This nitrogen gas protocol was based on an unpublished fourteen-page paper, double-spaced, written by three liberal arts professors who had no medical training, no scientific backgrounds, and one of them gave an interview to the press and said, “We probably talked about it for three hours. We just did the best we could.” That paper is so poorly written, so sloppy that it actually spells wrong the name of one of the authors.
Nathan: So the book was published in April of this year. So we're in a new administration now. And a day one priority for the administration, President Donald Trump renewed the focus on executions. He issued the executive order titled “Restoring the Death Penalty. What is changing under this administration?
Corinna: Simply put, the Trump administration is more death penalty. Go for death, even when it has been constitutionally barred. Let's go ahead and challenge those constitutional rulings in court. So, you know, go for it even when you know it's not constitutional. However, if you want to know where the death penalty is really going, you don't look at executions; you look at death sentencing. Because today's death sentences are tomorrow's executions, and if you don't have death sentences feeding the machinery of death, the death penalty will die on the vine. You know, death sentencing is down over eighty percent in the past two decades. So 2004, there were 125 new death sentences around the country. 2024, the year for which we have the latest available data. 26. That's it. It's down for reasons that an executive order can't fix. It's down because people understand that we get these cases wrong. You know, we've executed 1,600 people in the modern era, a little over that. We've had two hundred exonerations from death row. So for every eight people we execute, there's one that we admit, “Oops! We got that one totally wrong.” You know, people understand that. They understand racism. The defense attorneys are doing a better job at telling these people's stories. Death penalty support in Gallup is falling.
Nathan: Put it this way, though. You've studied this last 45 years, and of course, executions have been around for about as long as we can remember in historic record. But in your view, is there such a thing as a humane execution?
Corinna: Different people think about “humane” in different ways. Does that mean no pain? Does it mean the least available pain? Um, so what I talk about is non-torturous deaths. Um, because lethal injection is so bad, I'm like, okay, can we just talk about not torturing people? And one of the things that I think about in answer to your question is a saying I read. It's, “The heart stops reluctantly.” And what this person was talking about is that until the body is ready to give up life on its own, it takes physical force. It takes violence to stop the heart from beating. It could be a car accident. It could be a homicide. It could be an execution. But it takes violence to stop the heart from beating. And so, you know, to your question, there will be violence because the heart stops reluctantly. And it's a question of whether we acknowledge that. And I think what lethal injection does is to "secretize" that violence. So we don't think about it.
Nathan: Corinna Barrett Lain, on Sunday, November 16, at 5:00 p.m., she'll be at Wordsworth Books, that's here in Little Rock, discussing her book “Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection,” along with Arkansas ACLU legal director John Williams. Thanks so much for joining us today.
Corinna: Thank you. Nathan, it was a pleasure.
