Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America's Death Penalty - Austin Sarat
Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America's Death Penalty - Austin Sarat
Non-Fiction
Pages: 288
The title of this book suggests some kind of macabre narrative history of botched executions, targeted at the ghoulish true-crime aficionado. In reality, it's a book more aimed at lawyers and criminologists, written by a professor of jurisprudence and even cited recently by the Supreme Court.
It has two main threads to it - the first is a history of the evolution of the methods of capital punishment, from hanging to the electric chair, firing squad, gas chamber and finally lethal injection. Each time a state or court recommended a change from the previous method, it was in pursuit of a more humane and painless means of execution, rejecting the previous method, usually under legal challenge, as 'cruel and unusual', a relic of barbarity consigned to the dustbin of executional history along with stoning, the guillotine and so on. Throughout this history are examples of botched executions that lent their weight to the arguments in pursuit of more humane alternatives - the man who had to be hung twice, the woman decapitated by the noose, the man who caught fire during electrocution, the man who suffered two hours of prison personnel's failed attempts to find a usable vein.
Austin Sarat also focuses on what role these failures have played in the marshalling of arguments against capital punishment. It is a curious fact that for much of American history, botched executions have not been seen as any kind of argument against the existence of capital punishment itself, simply the method of choice at the time. More frequently, botched executions have been depicted by state and prison officials and newspapermen as unfortunate incidents, accidents, with no relevance or impact on the larger issue at hand, rather than inherent and inevitable outcomes in a capital punishment system in search of the impossible - a humane, painless and flawless way to kill someone via bureaucratic process and procedure.
Because the truth is, modern society needs the death penalty to be humane and painless, the state's role needs to be one of aloof and impartial judgement, otherwise the true hypocrisy of capital punishment is exposed. If the state is willing to accept pain and suffering to be part of the process of execution, then how does that kind of torture before death differ from the crimes the prisoners are condemned for?