Botched by Design
June 09, 2025 at 11:52PMThe State of South Carolina executed Brad Sigmon by firing squad on March 7, 2025. Sigmon chose the firing squad over electrocution, fearing that electrocution would “burn and cook him alive.” Why, though, would he choose the violence of the firing squad over lethal injection? Because lethal injection can spawn all kinds of complications that cause pain and suffering. For The Baffler, Charlotte Rosen takes a hard look at Corinna Barrett Lain’s book, Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection.
According to legal scholar Corinna Barrett Lain’s new book Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection, Sigmon’s choice of death by firing squad reflects a sound assessment of the well-documented horrors of lethal injection. The practice originated in 1977, the year after the Supreme Court reauthorized the death penalty, when Oklahoma—raring to restart state killings—sought a method other than the electric chair, which had fallen into disrepute due to its conspicuous cruelty. The state began exploring the possibility of death by lethal injection instead. Most of the doctors approached “wanted nothing to do with it,” writes Barrett Lain. But Oklahoma’s medical examiner, Dr. Jay Chapman, was eager to help. He developed a three-drug combination that the state quickly adopted, and which soon became the model for other states.
The scandal of lethal injections is not simply that they are regularly botched or rest on shaky foundations; it’s that the death penalty and the U.S. carceral state more broadly is an apparatus that authorizes and enshrines anti-black violence in an ostensibly post-civil rights age. Particularly when support for death penalty among Americans is at historic lows, Barrett Lain’s text feels, at best, like a missed opportunity. To be sure, it is critical to disentangle the specific forces and institutions that produce common forms of state violence, which her analysis suitably provides. But if doing so mystifies the very structure and politics that produce that violence, it threatens to occlude more than it clarifies—and keeps the U.S. racial state’s abhorrent killing apparatus churning apace.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/06/09/botched-by-design/
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