Thanks for posting this! The first comment actually raises a question that I get a lot in public lectures: Why not just OD them on barbituates (or whatever)? Louisiana is considering nitrous oxide (which my dentist called "happy nose" to kill people in gas chambers again - http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2014/05/death_by_nitrogen_gas_will_the_new_method_of_execution_save_the_death_penalty.html). The TN Attorney General was asked for his opinion on the bill to make electrocution the default method of execution if lethal injection drugs are factually unavailable. This is what he wrote: http://www.tn.gov/attorneygeneral/op/2014/op14-29.pdf Even though he claims that the bill is defensible, the last paragraph acknowledges that at least one state has found electrocution to be unconstitutional: “More recently, the Nebraska Supreme Court held that electrocution was unconstitutional under its state constitution, whose cruel-and-unusual-punishment language mirrors that of the federal and Tennessee Constitutions. See State v. Mata, 275 Neb. 1, 745 N.W.2d 229 (2008). The court noted that it had upheld electrocution as constitutional as recently as 2000 but stated that its previous decision had not relied on a factual record “showing electrocution’s physiological effects on a prisoner.” The court also noted that Nebraska was the only state imposing electrocution as its sole method of execution. Mata, 275 Neb. at 32, 745 N.W.2d at 256-57.” Even if electrocution is not found to be unconstitutional as such, in TN or in the US, this “backwards” move has given people on death row a whole new set of issues to litigate!

Very interesting post -- thank you for this analysis!

Wow, thanks for the constructive feedback.

Yes, this is a very serious problem. Some people call it "secondary trauma": http://ejusa.org/learn/secondary%2Btrauma There's a great interview with the former executioner in Texas in Herzog's Into the Abyss (it's one of the only scenes in that film that I really liked). The ex-executioner of Virginia is also pretty awesome: http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-02-10/local/37026104_1_death-penalty-death-sentences-linwood-briley There's also the issue of trauma for family members of the executed, and for members of the community more generally. I will write about this more in the weeks to come, but here's a statement by a community member in Nashville FYI: http://reachcoalition.wordpress.com/2013/12/08/community-voices-dr-ann-charvat-on-the-trauma-of-execution-for-family-and-friends-of-the-executed/

Medical doctors don't generally participate in executions in the US! The AMA issued a statement against the participation of physicians in any part of the execution process: http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/physician-resources/medical-ethics/code-medical-ethics/opinion206.page. But the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled against the NC Medical Board's ban on physician participation in executions in 2009: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/north-carolina-supreme-court-overrules-state-medical-boards-ban-doctor-participation-executions (They still haven't managed to execute anyone because of legal challenges to the execution protocol, etc.) Execution drugs are usually administered by a correctional officer -- yet another reason why the whole process is so problematic.

Wow, what an amazing story -- thank you for sharing this. Yes, I agree that jury selection is a huge issue, and so is prosecutorial misconduct. This four-part series on prosecutorial misconduct in Arizona found that it played a role in 50% of all capital cases. That's above and beyond the perfectly legal power of prosecutors to exclude someone from the jury because they were rude enough to correct the prosecutor when he is actively misleading the jurors! http://www.azcentral.com/news/arizona/articles/20131027milke-krone-prosecutors-conduct-day1.html?nclick_check=1

I think it's important to engage with the views of people who have actually lost a loved one to murder, many of whom have found no solace in the execution of the convicted murderer and a complicated sense of pain that only compounds their loss. See, for example: http://www.mvfhr.org/, http://conservativesconcerned.org/why-were-concerned/victims/, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18791726, http://reachcoalition.wordpress.com/2013/11/20/reflections-on-love-loss-and-the-death-penalty-by-a-murder-victims-family-member/

This is a fair point. But I think it also raises philosophical and political questions about the sense in which state execution *is* brought about by a human agent or agents. On one hand, a small group of human agents plan, prepare, and carry out executions. These include the executioner(s), the warden, the correctional officers who supervise death watch and bring the prisoner to the gurney or the chair. They also include, less directly, the attorney general who requests an execution date, the judge who grants it, the prosecutor who asked for the death penalty, the jury who sentenced the prisoners, the voters who support capital punishment, the "tough on crime" candidates who endorse them, and most broadly, the public that may or may not vote, but that implicitly supports the death penalty by not opposing it. Lots of human agents there, very few (if any) of whom would regard them as the agent of a homicide. Because one of the conditions under which "good" people support capital punishment is by displacing their own individual agency onto "the state," understood not as a human agent but as an impersonal dispenser of justice. By not recognizing their own role as agents of legalized homicide, they can maintain an absolute distinction between murder and execution. This is a distinction that, while fueled by intense emotions (as we can see from the comments above), falls apart under closer scrutiny. Who exactly commits the act of homicide? Is it the executioner? No, they're just performing a service to the state. That's one of the reasons why those who are directly involved in carrying out an execution are guaranteed anonymity; they are not supposed to be acting on their own behalf as individual agents, but rather on behalf of the state. Who is the state? Is it you and me, understood as individual human agents? No, we're just innocent, law-abiding citizens. *We* don't kill people, *they* do! The violence of execution as an act of homicide is effaced by this ambiguity of agency, but a trace of this violence remains on the death certificate that baldly states: homicide.

gracias!

Yes, this is a great point. It makes me think of a film that John Protevi recommended months ago, Bastards of the Party, which is about the criminalization of organizations like the Black Panthers through COINTELPRO, etc., and the emergence of the Bloods and the Crips in the wake of what I think we could call a counter-insurgency against black radical politics. No surprise that gangs should re-politicize themselves as street organizations and reclaim this history, as well as creating new forms of political action.

Statements and pictures from inside Pelican Bay and Corcoran, posted at Solitary Watch: http://solitarywatch.com/2013/07/10/faces-and-voices-of-the-california-prison-hunger-strike/