How do you think an iron maiden worked? This is a genuine question. We’ve all seen ‘em before, in illustrations
or games or movies. A sort of sarcophagus lined with spikes, a
truly evil looking piece of medieval machinery. But really, how does it work? It’s usually categorized as a torture device,
but any depiction of one seems like a closet that would just kill their victim almost instantly
through shock and/or blood loss. Kinda defeats the point of the big evil-looking
torture mechanism. You’re not supposed to think this hard about
an iron maiden. You’re supposed to see one, go “aww jeez,
glad I don’t live in the middle ages,” and walk into the next room of the museum. They don’t make sense because, historically,
the iron maiden…did not exist. There is exactly one written record describing
such a device, and that “record” was effectively a tourism flier written 200 years after the
iron maiden was supposedly used. Although it’s ubiquitously referred to as
a medieval torture device, there is absolutely no physical evidence of one existing before
the 1800s, a solid 300 years after the end of the medieval period. And, I should point out, they weren’t used
in the 1800s. Instead they were fabricated as antiques and
sold to uncritical museums and collectors, who correctly assumed that such a brutal looking
piece would entice and excite visitors. Why? Because the iron maiden presents more than
a simple shock piece. Instead, fictional or not, it fits into our
favorite ongoing cultural narrative– that we are, in whatever the current year is, the
least barbaric we have ever been. That, for all our contemporary conflicts and
foibles, at least we aren’t like that. At least we didn’t throw people in an iron
maiden. In 1888, the state of New York created a commission
to determine “the most humane and practical method of carrying into effect the sentence
of death in capital cases.” This commission delivered a report nearly
100 pages long, covering not just their simple recommendation, but an exhaustive runthrough
of every method of execution they could find. The iron maiden has a section in this report,
as does being buried alive, mauled by wild beasts, and lashed to the mouth of a cannon. Many sections, such as the iron maiden, are
based on hearsay rather than historical record. But it’s the section on hanging, a method
with near-infinite history to pull from, that presents the commission’s most self-reflective
moment. Quoting from a recent issue of Harper’s
Magazine, they write: “We are led to wonder if the time will ever
arrive when the gallows shall be placed as a curiosity in museums, and sight-seers shall
flock to gaze upon it and marvel how a people who gave evidence of so much civilization
and refinement as did their forefathers…could have employed such a machine for the amelioration
of the moral condition of mankind. Will posterity shudder at a model of a gallows
set up in complete working order on a shelf, as we of today shudder when we examine the
ancient instruments of torture collected in the Old World museums? Will the American of the year of our Lord
2,000 be so far in advance of us? We venture to hope so.” The report absolutely nails our evolving moral
relationship with the methods of this most extreme punishment. In the year 2000, many of us did shudder at
the idea of the gallows. But what that commission in 1888 can’t see
is the larger cycle; how we *excuse* the practices of today via the specter of previous barbarism. The 120 years since that report was written
has seen consistent declarations that not only have we found a new solution to execution,
but the old solution was brutish, crass, inhumane. This new solution always represents a new
era, the most evolved, the most enlightened– that is, until it too is rendered barbaric
by the next development in line. This is the narrative of capital punishment–
in the United States, at least. From noose to electric chair to injection,
each new method of execution has been introduced with the promise that it will do the impossible;
take the life of an unwilling participant in a way that is gentle, clean, and enlightened. However, the reality of execution methods
paints a different picture. Each successive approach to capital punishment
does inform us about the era and culture that applied it, but not in a way that presents
some linear arc towards utopian punishment. Instead, the modern history of execution demonstrates
which aspects of criminal justice our institutions are interested in evolving, and which barbaric
elements the system preserves. Now, a little post-introduction preamble (postamble?). The topic of this video is grisly. While I will not be showing any photos or
videos of people experiencing the “process” of capital punishment, I will be describing
events surrounding executions that are undeniably disturbing. If you want to avoid hearing, for example,
the things that happen when a lethal injection is botched, I totally understand and suggest
you find a different one of my videos to watch. I also suspect that YouTube will not allow
this video to remain monetized or unrestricted for long. If you want to support this kind of essay,
and I hope you do because it really takes a lot to put something like this together,
I suggest signing up for Nebula, which provides a more stable home for work like this. On Nebula, you can also watch an additional
video I made on this topic– more on that later. Finally, my discussion of capital punishment
is generally not going to include the specifics of what crime landed any individual person
on death row. All of that is easy enough to find if you
so desire, but it’s outside the scope of this essay. The longest chapter in the history of state
executions indisputably belongs to hanging. The Odyssey includes hanging, The Book of
Esther includes hanging. And, while the basic equation of rope-noose-neck
has remained basically unchanged, the social phenomenon of hanging has shifted to suit
the whims of its time and place. The most basic, you could say primitive, version
of hanging is what’s present in The Odyssey. After slaughtering all the would-be suitors,
Odysseus declares that the women of the house, who were insolent to him and his mother, don’t
deserve a clean death either. He takes the rope from his ship and strings
the offending maids up one after another– the story notes that the hanged women died
“most miserably,” with their feet convulsing for a while. This slow, drawn out death was sometimes the
point– Odysseus takes care to say that the noose is an alternative to a clean death. Hanging was often a public spectacle, an act
of punishment meant to be witnessed. In Michel Foucault’s book “Discipline
and Punish,” he writes that “The public execution has a juridico-political
function…over and above the crime that has placed the sovereign in contempt, it deploys
before all eyes an invincible force. Its aim is not so much to re-establish a balance
as to bring into play, as its extreme point, the dissymmetry between the subject who has
dared violate the law and the all-powerful sovereign who displays his strength…, the
punishment is carried out in such a way as to give a spectacle not of measure, but of
imbalance and excess…there must be an emphatic affirmation of power and of its intrinsic
superiority.” Foucault is writing about more than hanging
here– he begins the book with an agonizing account of a man partially pulled apart by
horses, his dismemberment “assisted” by various executioners. But gallows are easily included in his analysis
of public execution by the state; to see a murder carried out at a leisurely pace in
front of a crowd was to recognize that the institution doing the killing is unquestionable. In this way, the looming shadow of the gallows
and the slow death by strangulation are points in favor of hanging. Foucault says, explicitly, that this “theater
of terror” was not “a lingering hangover from an earlier age.” It all serves a purpose– “its entire apparatus
were inscribed in the political functioning of the penal system.” Foucault was a French writer, and his theories
on public execution largely drew from European examples. But it’s not hard to transpose his analysis
onto America’s own iconic hangings– more specifically, its history of lynching. A campaign of terror perpetrated on black
Americans by white supremacists, the point of lynchings were to be public. Lynching was nominally against the law, but
often done with the implied consent or even active participation of law enforcement, and
the messaging was clear: white supremacy was the law, the invincible force that Foucault
wrote about. In fact, even though any kind of public execution
was, by the letter of the law, illegal in the United States, many Southern towns in
the early 20th century still held public hangings. These hangings were by and large a weak attempt
to appease mobs of would-be lynchers. But the killings would have occurred with
or without state cooperation. That’s as clear an indication as any of
who actually held the power to define legality and life. Although there were many methods of lynching,
part of hanging’s appeal was its staying power. The victims of lyching would purposefully
be left on display for long after their murder; the image of a tree made into an impromptu
gallows still functions as iconography for white supremacist violence. Outside the American South however, there
were efforts to “professionalize” hanging. Starting with the construction of purpose-made
gallows and continuing through innovations in rope grade and fall height, a “good”
or “desirable” hanging came to be understood as one in which the executed party’s neck
broke on the initial drop. A slower death by strangulation was the less
desirable option. Executioners would occasionally boast of their
talent in knowing exactly how far someone needed to fall, based on their height, weight,
and other factors. But for all the physics and calculations that
could theoretically make hanging a less amateur method of killing, botched executions continued
to happen. The fall wouldn’t break a neck. Executioners would sometimes pull on people’s
feet in an attempt to hasten their asphyxiation, and occasionally the rope itself would snap,
sending the would-be executionee tumbling to the ground, alive. Other times, the initial fall would open wounds
on the executed’s neck, or even cause, and I’m sorry to put this image in your head,
partial or complete decapitation. Concurrent to these professionalization efforts,
portions of the public were experiencing a significant cultural shift. As Austin Sarat, whose research I’m drawing
from for much of this essay, writes, a new middle class that prided itself on etiquette
and taste viewed the unruly mobs that attended public executions as base, vulgar. At the same time, hospitals became more common
and thus the experience of death shrank from everyday life. The idea of watching people executed by the
state brought the recent horrors of the civil war to mind. In short, it wasn’t exciting to watch someone
die anymore. Lynchings, the exception to this cultural
shift, arguably happened because the mobs perpetrating them didn’t see their victims
as “people” at all. What’s absent from these attitude changes
is, you might notice, concern for the hanged themselves. The moral unease over public executions was
largely focused on the corrupting influence of violence on spectators, not the painful
and drawn-out deaths experienced by the people at the center of the event. And fittingly, just before the turn of the
20th century, new technology presented a solution to the “problem” of capital punishment. It was a bold, modern take on execution that
would place the entire ordeal behind prison walls. It promised to do away with the residual barbarism
that still haunted the gallows. In 1890, New York introduced the electric
chair. Five years earlier, David Bennett-Hill, the
mayor of New York, made this motive explicit. “The present mode of executing criminals
has come down to us from the dark ages,” he said. “It may well be questioned whether the science
of the present day cannot provide a means for taking the life of such as condemned to
die in a less barbarous manner.” Science had, in a sense, already demonstrated
an alternative method. Nine years before the electric chair was officially
introduced and 4 years before Bennett-Hill’s speech, a likely-drunk dockworker wandered
into the new electrical plant in Buffalo, New York. According to another worker, he yelled that
he was “going to stop the machine,” put his hands directly on one of the generators,
and was killed as a massive electric shock passed through his body. Electricity’s early history features a significant
amount of experimenting with its deadliness. The most notorious example might be the absurd
killing of Topsy the elephant, but decades earlier, pioneers in the field of electrocution
had convinced local animal control to use electricity as a more “humane” method
of euthanasia. As New York sought a method of execution that
matched the progress and etiquette of the modern era, the notion of using electricity
seemed only appropriate. This is, in fact, the reason for that 1888
commission on humane execution. After running down all the antiquated methods
of capital punishment, the commission concludes that “the death produced by a sufficiently
powerful electric current is the most rapid and humane produced by any agent at our command.” Sidenote, for those familiar with the saga
of direct vs alternating current, it will come as no surprise that Thomas Edison enthusiastically
supported the invention of the electric chair. The chair ran on an alternating current, which
Edison wanted to establish as the deadlier version of electricity. It’s impossible to know what happened during
history’s first hanging. But for better or for worse, we know exactly
what happened to William Kemmler, the first man executed via electric chair. Despite the promises of its inventors and
the findings of New York’s commission, the execution was neither rapid nor painless. Kemmler’s death took a full eight minutes. He did not die after the supposedly lethal
first shock– he drooled, made noises, and his chest continued to move. The executioner threw the switch again, this
time for a full minute. Kemmler’s body began to smoke and give off
a foul smell. He did die, eventually. Not a promising start for the modern solution
to capital punishment. But even though it initially failed to deliver
a “better” death than hanging, the electric chair continued operation in New York, and
was subsequently adopted by many other states. It was, in general, less error-prone than
its predecessor, with no analogue to the slow “secondary death” of asphyxiation delivered
by the gallows. However, when the electric chair faltered,
it often did so in a way more grotesquely spectacular than what came before. In several cases up through the 21st century,
the chair has caused its victims to smoke or even catch fire; in the case of Jesse Tafero
in 1976, flames burst from around his head on each of the several shocks it took to ultimately
kill him. In one of the most infamous uses of the electric
chair, however, nothing about the procedure “went wrong.” The execution itself was notable because the
person being killed was a woman; in 1928, New York executed Ruth Snyder, only the 6th
woman to receive capital punishment in the 20th century. But Snyder’s death wasn’t simply immortalized
for her gender; rather, it was that a picture of her execution ran on the front page of
the New York Daily News. The act of capturing the picture itself was
an exciting bit of journalistic subterfuge. Tom Howard, a photographer from out of state
(so the prison guards wouldn’t recognize him) strapped an improvised camera to his
heel, with the controls for the long exposure required connected to a bulb in his pocket. The resulting picture is blurry and almost
impressionistic, but the abstraction only adds to the horror of it. Straps bind her arms and legs, her face is
almost totally obscured by a mask and helmet, yet her eyes are still visible. The long exposure smears the edges of her
body and the device she’s fastened to. It feels as if you can see the electricity. It feels as if you’re witnessing the moment
of her death. It feels, through the clear hastiness, the
near voyeuristic quality of the photo, like you’re uncovering a new medieval torture
device. And this picture ran on the front page of
the Daily News– a very popular tabloid newspaper, with circulation of over a million. The first ever published photo of an electric
chair in use. The headline is all caps, one word, exclamation
point. “DEAD!” …
In that very first case of execution by electric chair in 1890, Kemmler’s attorneys argued
that this new method constituted cruel and unusual punishment. He was sentenced to a mechanism of murder
previously only used on animals, with no guarantee of an easy death. In response, the Supreme Court responded that,
in capital cases, the electric chair was “the most humane and practical method known to
modern science.” The court stated that the punishment of death,
on its own, is not cruel. Cruel and unusual, as used in the constitution,
“implies something inhuman and barbarous.” The electric chair enjoyed a long tenure,
and over the past 120 years, carried out more executions in the US than any other method. But most of those executions happened before
1950– in the past 40 years, the electric chair has been part of less than 10% of America’s
capital punishments, and it’s not the primary method of execution in any state. For many states, it took less than half a
century for the chair to transform from “the most humane and practical method” to a relic
that was, in fact, cruel and unusual. Its legacy, influenced by the stories of its
explosive failures, now sits next to the noose. It’s another old and brutal tool, reminiscent
of a more primitive age. Like hanging, its changed reputation was partially
due to the grisly notoriety the chair eventually earned. Like hanging, the change also happened because
new machinery of death had since emerged. I would guess that most Americans are somewhat
familiar with the electric chair or the gallows as a method of execution. The electric chair in particular has little
legacy outside of individual capital punishments. The same can’t be said of the innovation
Nevada introduced in 1924: the gas chamber. Like the electric chair just 30 years before,
the pitch for the gas chamber was one of painless, near-serene execution. The original idea was that the person sentenced
to death could be gassed while sleeping in their own cell, an execution so gentle they
wouldn’t even know it took place. Even in the 20s though, it was hard to shake
the violent connotation of gas; liquid chlorine, phosgene, and mustard gas had all been used
to terrifying effect in World War 1, still held in recent cultural memory. And yet, less than six years after the end
of the war, a man on death row named Gee Jon breathed in hydrocyanic acid in a specially
built room in Nevada and died. It took a little while for other states to
catch up– Arizona built a gas chamber in 1930, and by the end of the decade, California,
Missouri, Oregon, Wyoming, and my lovely home of North Carolina joined the trend. And yet, the chamber too failed to fulfill
its promise of a quick, easy death. In 1936, North Carolina’s execution of Allen
Foster via cyanide gas lasted several awful minutes, during which time Foster’s body
spasmed and his eyes showed obvious agony. One local professor wrote that the chamber
was “a pitiably brutal failure in the search for a more humane way of killing.” Proportionally, the gas chamber was less successful
at delivering a death “properly” than the chair or hanging– over 5% of the deaths
delivered by gas in the US were botched in one way or another. You might assume, as I did, that this was
because of the gas chamber’s surely brief stint in the spotlight– after World War
2, after the holocaust, how could anyone view this as a humane, painless way to go? But you would be incorrect. Not only did gassings continue up through
1999(!), Maryland, Mississippi, and New Mexico all constructed their own chambers after the
conclusion of World War 2. It’s not that the connection went unnoticed;
at another botched gassing in 1967, protestors outside were met with the founder of the American
Nazi party, who held a sign that said “Gas, the only cure for black crime and Red treason.” To be honest, I have a hard time rationalizing
how it’s even possible the American gas chamber was used for as long as it was. It caused death slower than its predecessors,
was more error prone, and is inextricably tied to one of the most well-known genocides
of all time. I can only find logic in the chamber in context
of what it was succeeded by: lethal injection. The initial promise of the gas chamber was,
essentially, a medicalized death. Rather than gravity, dismemberment, or the
barely controlled force of electricity, why not approach death in a way that resembled,
at least aesthetically, the same chemicals used in hospitals? Lethal injection’s pitch was almost identical. And more than any execution method that came
before it, lethal injection was a triumph of presentation. With a delivery no more horrifying than a
blood test, and a death as easy as going to sleep, lethal injection seemed to fill the
role the state had been searching for; an involuntary death absent of barbarism. Of course, the irony of a medicalized treatment
meant to nonconsensually kill a “patient” is clear as soon as you investigate who participates
in these death sentences– or rather, who refuses. The American Medical Association, the American
Nursing Association, the American College of Physicians, the American Public Health
Association, all have denounced any medical professional taking part in the health-conscious
theater of a lethal injection. Together, the associations stated that “when
the healthcare professional serves in an execution under circumstances that mimic care, the healing
purposes of health services and technology become distorted.” This isn’t even a new stance; back in 1888,
the commission searching for a humane method of execution identified the potential deadliness
of lethal injection, but wrote that it so resembled the practice of medicine, “it
is hardly deemed advisable to urge its application for the purposes of legal executions against
the almost unanimous protest of the medical profession.” Remember, that’s the commission that ultimately
chose the chair. In addition to the people who refuse to take
part, the injection itself has, in a manner of speaking, attempted to abstain. Most states in the country initially adopted
a three-drug cocktail of sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide, and potassium chloride. However, in 2011, Hospira, the primary provider
of sodium thiopental, ceased production of the drug– in part because it couldn’t
otherwise stop states from using it for executions. Some states attempted to pivot to another
drug, pentobarbital, for injections, but its manufacturer quickly blocked sales to death
penalty states. If you’re invested in finding the most humane
method of killing a person, the actions of doctors and pharmaceutical companies might
seem frustrating. With our history of crude and unsuccessful
executions, aren’t they standing in the way of the most promising option? But this perspective assumes an effectiveness
onto lethal injection that it’s never demonstrated. The promise of the original three drug blend
was a sedate and painless experience for both the executed and any onlookers. Sodium thiopental would put the subject to
sleep, pancuronium bromide would paralyze them, and finally potassium chloride would
kill them via cardiac arrest, stopping their heart. This combination was suggested by the chief
medical examiner of Oklahoma, the first state in the country to make lethal injection their
official method of execution. When other states followed Oklahoma’s lead,
they also followed its chemical formula– simple imitation is how these three drugs
became the de facto ingredients for lethal injection. What’s missing from this history is the
validation of the cocktail’s ability to do what it promised. The selection of the lethal cocktail was done
quickly and near-randomly; Jay Chapman, Oklahoma’s medical examiner, was not an anesthesiologist
nor a toxicologist, and chose an anesthetic and paralytic based on ‘his own experience
being anesthetized’- a process that notably, did not result in his death. Even at the time, Chapman admitted that he
“didn’t do any research.” Interviewed 30 years after he unwittingly
chose the chemicals that would be used to kill over a thousand people, he said “I
had absolutely no concept at the time…this business of lethal injection was a pure sidelight.” I tell you all this to make sense of the fact
that lethal injection has the highest botch rate of any execution method thus far discussed,
proportionally the most fuck-ups in the past hundred twenty years. Over 7% of the state’s attempts to carry
out capital punishment with lethal injection have contained some failure of protocol or
chemistry that has inevitably made the supposedly painless death into an excruciating sideshow. And despite the drug cocktail’s contentious
history, of which I’ve barely scratched the surface, many executions are botched before
the chemicals are even introduced. Often, the staff– who, remember, are typically
not doctors or nurses– are unable to find a suitable vein. This search can, and has, gone on for hours. While the injection is intended to go in the
arm, executions have been attempted with the IV running into an inmate’s legs, their
neck, or even their groin. Finding a vein is no guarantee of a successful
application either; in 2006, Angel Diaz continued to live for over 30 minutes after he was injected
with the drug cocktail. An autopsy revealed that executioners had
shoved a needle all the way through his vein, and the drugs had instead flowed into soft
tissue. The chemical burns on his arm were compared
to “a kid who had fallen into a campfire.” A similar sequence of events happened with
Clayton Lockett in 2014, when, after a rushed hour of attempting to find a place to administer
the injection, received a single IV supposedly connected to a vein in his groin. But through a failure of expertise and medical
equipment onhand, the vein collapsed and the drugs were once again pumped directly into
his tissue. The breakdown of competent injection administration
is only compounded by the wantonly chosen drugs being delivered. General anesthetic doesn’t work if it’s
simply pushed into the meat of a body, cardiac arrest doesn’t immediately occur if the
chemicals never reach the heart. But the most revealing piece of the lethal
injection is the middle ingredient in the cocktail, the paralytic. The Human Rights Watch notes: [Pancuronium bromide] is a neuromuscular blocking
agent that paralyzes all of a body’s voluntary muscles, including the lungs and diaphragm…It
does not affect consciousness, however. Nor does it affect experience of pain. Without proper anesthesia, anyone given [the
drug] will feel himself suffocating, but, because the pancuronium bromide prevents any
movement, speech, or facial expression, he will be unable to reveal that he is suffering. If the prisoner is still conscious when the
potassium chloride is injected, the [pancuronium bromide] will also prevent him from conveying
to the executioners or the witnesses that he is experiencing pain. As the Human Rights Watch then points out,
the paralytic does not aid the anesthetic nor quicken the cardiac arrest. Seemingly its only job is, instead, to improve
the aesthetics of an execution for onlookers. In the event that a prisoner receives too
little anesthetic, a relatively likely outcome given the lack of medical expertise present,
the potassium chloride that causes cardiac arrest would be agonizing. In the history of lethal injections, there
are many cases of inmates convulsing as they died, absolutely looking like they suffered
through their last breath. But because of the included paralytic, we
have no idea the true number of executions that end in agony. Somehow, that cocktail still might represent
a higher standard of lethal injection than what’s been practiced over the past decade. As manufacturers have ceased production or
barred sales of the original three drugs used, states have sought other options with the
same level of research and care that originally defined the process. In fact, several states have left the drugs
completely unstipulated in their policies, instead deferring to individual correction
officials. As legal scholar Corinna Barrett Lain writes,
“the culmination of these irregularities is a world where lethal injection drug protocols
are decided by google searches and other decision-making processes that would be patently unacceptable
in any other area of administrative law.” One such drug that states have turned to is
the anesthetic midazolam, but doctors have pointed out that the effects of midazolam
have significant variability between people– one person could require “ten times the
dose” of another. In 2021, John Marion Grant received a combination
of drugs including Midazolam from executioners in Oklahoma. He vomited several times after receiving the
injection and didn’t fall unconscious for 15 minutes, officially pronounced dead six
minutes after that. In light of the rampant botching and increased
attention paid to lethal injections, many states have responded by obscuring more of
the process– curtains are drawn, medical procedures are done before the execution officially
starts, inmates have even entered the execution chamber already unconscious. Last year’s execution of Joe Nathan James
Jr. was the longest lethal injection process yet, and indeed the single lengthiest recorded
execution in US history, and yet prison officials stated that there was “nothing out of the
ordinary.” An autopsy revealed this was an obvious lie;
James’ body was covered in puncture wounds, unexplained incisions, and bruising. On the day of the execution, reporters were
delayed entry, with two told they “didn’t meet dress code.” Although the process took over three hours,
only the last 20 minutes were visible to onlookers. As the fantasy of lethal injection’s “quick
and painless” executions has become more apparent, so too has its true appeal as a
mechanism of state-sponsored death. Only the superficial barbarism of the process
has been reduced, but the superficialities are the whole game; actually delivering a
“humane” death is far less important than presenting the appearance of one. Although we enjoy perceiving ourselves as
less barbarous than previous generations, we also frequently exclude imprisoned populations
from that view of society. We’re the land of the free, so long as you
don’t count the millions that are constitutionally enslaved. And in keeping with this line of thinking,
many have questioned if we need a “humane” method of execution at all. There is certainly malice towards prisoners
here; a substantial number of people want any punishment to be actively torturous. But another significant part of the population
simply doesn’t want to think about it at all, and this is where lethal injection shines. The scientific, near-medical lethal injection
sounds good, and sounding good is the only bar it needs to clear. This opinion has been more or less stated
explicitly in the Supreme Court. Justice Scalia said that in comparison to
the deaths of murder victims, lethal injection “looks pretty desirable,” and continued
to write “how enviable a quiet death by lethal injection” would be. It’s a bit of judicial lethargy disguised
as moral relativity. Scalia was probably aware that many lethal
injections were not “enviable” deaths, I just don’t think he gave a shit. Recognizing the prison system contained injustices
would mean that someone would have to do work correcting them. Ironically, the stated goal of a quick and
painless execution is perhaps “best” delivered by methods that feel most brutal. It is an admittedly shocking fact to learn
that 4 states technically allow firing squads as a method of execution. It may be even more shocking to learn that
Utah executed a man via firing squad as recently as 2010. And yet, statistically, firing squads provide
a quicker death with fewer opportunities for error than any other method discussed. The man killed in 2010 chose to die by firing
squad. In 2022, improvising after the state ran out
of lethal injection drugs, South Carolina demanded a death row inmate pick a method
of execution. He too chose the firing squad over the alternative
of the electric chair. But despite these two cases, trends don’t
indicate the firing squad is really making a comeback. Its swiftness and efficacy are undercut by
its complete lack of subtlety. You can pretend that a corpse killed by chemicals
or electricity avoided physical trauma, it’s impossible to make the same claim about a
bullet hole. What might work for the condemned doesn’t
work for the onlooker, the same reason the guillotine has never been used in the states. The violence of the process is just too obvious. If you’re a critic of the death penalty
though, you know that the barbarity of the system starts earlier and runs far deeper
than solely the execution method. A broad-scale look at death row reveals an
overpowering sense of randomness– there are no crimes that carry mandatory death sentences,
so whether any individual person ends up facing capital punishment is hugely dependent on
factors outside the scope of the crime; the state it was committed in, for example, or
the sympathy of its leadership decades after the crime itself. The average person on death row has been there
almost 20 years; they could be granted clemency by a politician who wasn’t even old enough
to vote when the crime was committed. You can find countless examples of identical
crimes landing one person on death row and another with a life sentence, random variables
landing them on one side of a coin flip or the other. But simultaneously, looking at every variable
as “random” is completely naive. The death penalty is shot through with racial
bias, and has been for as long as we’ve been keeping statistics on it. In decades of studies up through the present
day, the overwhelming trend is that black lives simply matter less to the justice system. Controlling for all confounding variables,
cases with white victims resulted in the death penalty more than four times as often as black
victims. Incorporate gender and the numbers come into
even sharper relief; the murder of a white woman is thirteen times more likely to result
in a capital sentence than the murder of a black man. Maybe the most striking number is 21, the
vanishingly small total number of executions since 1970 for cases in which a white defendant
killed a black victim. With the races reversed, that number is more
than ten times higher, a figure completely disproportionate to the crime rates between
races. And that’s on top of every other level of
discrimination in the justice system; jury manipulation, police misconduct, prosecutorial
aggression. Earlier, I said that courts didn’t want
to acknowledge the US’s carceral failings, because it would mean they’d have to do
something about it. This wasn’t really me being flip; this too,
has been stated near-explicitly by the supreme court. In 1987’s McCleskey v. Kemp, Warren McCleskey’s
lawyers argued that capital punishment in Georgia demonstrated a clear pattern of racial
discrimination, with similar crimes yielding significantly different sentences based on
the race of the defendant and victim. The Supreme Court generally did not disagree
with the statistical findings; however, they ruled that statistics alone were insufficient
to demonstrate unconstitutional discrimination. Justice Powell wrote, “McCleskey's claim, taken to its logical
conclusion, throws into serious question the principles that underlie our entire criminal
justice system. The Eighth Amendment is not limited in application
to capital punishment, but applies to all penalties.... Thus, if we accepted McCleskey's claim that
racial bias has impermissibly tainted the capital sentencing decision, we could soon
be faced with similar claims as to other types of penalty.” Throws into serious question the principles
that underlie our entire criminal justice system!! Yeah dude! It does!! And yet instead of acting, the court shuts
the door, because the questions raised about the implementation of capital punishment could
start a chain reaction that reveals the house of cards everything is built on. Even before we get to sentencing, there’s
the issue of, you know, if the accused did the crime at all. A statistic so staggering I’ve never been
able to get it out of my head is that, since the mid-1970s, 1,565 people have been executed
in the United States, and in that same time, 190 people have been fully exonerated from
death row. Not had their sentences reduced or plead to
a lesser crime, but released from prison following proof of their innocence. Defendants of color make up a disproportionately
high number of these wrongfully convicted inmates as well. You could view that exoneration rate with
optimism, that hey, the system works, look at all those people set free before they had
to complete their deadly sentence. Or, you could read it the way I do- that for
every 8 people the state has executed, at least one person sentenced to die has been
innocent. Those odds do not inspire faith in the system’s
accuracy. But, after I’ve spent so much time on it,
you may be shocked by the most important statistic of all; capital punishment is dwindling. Both death sentences and executions have been
on a downward slope for decades. 2021 had the least executions in the US in
40 years, 2022 wasn’t far behind. Many states have completely barred capital
punishment, others have put it on indefinite hiatus. This legislation is propped up by public opinion,
which is generally experiencing similar 40-year lows in support for the death penalty, and
40-year highs in opposition to it. It feels like, after a century of promising
to create humane executions, we’re recognizing that the barbarity runs deeper than the literal
moment of death. Yes, the noose, chair, chamber, injection,
have all taken their turn functioning as machines to slowly and cruelly kill people, but only
after the even slower machine of the American justice system has done the same. Where is the lack of barbarity in making someone
spend decades on death row, wondering if this is the week they die? Where is the progress, the enlightenment of
contemporary society, in a handful of counties selecting a handful of criminals with all
the precision of a racist pachinko machine? The more light you give capital punishment,
the more the entire structure bleeds with a brutality that was supposedly left in a
more primitive age. The thing is- State-sponsored killing isn’t exclusive
to death row. And although 2021 had notably few capital
punishment cases carried to their conclusion, it still managed to break a record in deadliness.
2021 saw 1,048 people killed by police, more people gunned down in a single year than have
been officially executed in the 21st century. 2021 broke the previous record for police
killings, set in 2020, which broke the previous record, set in 2019. 2022 was deadliest, again, and virtually every
source of this data also notes that the true number of police killings is almost certainly
underreported. Murders by police have increased year over
year despite falling crime rates, with or without the presence of protests, and- of
course- in opposition to falling capital sentences. If the ethical discomfort with capital punishment
stems from its excruciating deliberation– the years of court cases, the discoveries
of conflicting evidence, the endless debates over execution method– police killings are…a
nice little mental shortcut. No court case whatsoever. No uncomfortable process to bureaucratically
decide what moral consequence they deserve. No chance of an exoneration, no eventual recognition
of personhood, no tortured death by a machine supposed to deliver a humane one. Instead, what we have is a return to Foucault’s
theories of execution as a public display of “an invincible force. Its aim is not so much to re-establish a balance
as to bring into play, as its extreme point, the dissymmetry between the subject who has
dared to violate the law and the all-powerful sovereign who displays his strength.” And when this is the goal, any method is fair
play; shooting, strangling, beating to death. Nor does “the law” have to conform to
pre-existing written standards. When an individual becom es judge, jury, and
executioner, they are the law and can as such decide when their sovereignty has been questioned
and what retribution they can respond with. “This superiority is not simply that of
right, but that of the physical strength of the sovereign beating down upon the body of
his adversary and mastering it…The ceremony of punishment, then, is an exercise of 'terror'.” Last year, researchers mapped police killings
onto the geographic history of lynchings in the United States. Wouldn’t you know it, even after controlling
for factors like crime levels, segregation, and socioeconomic conditions, the number of
lynchings in a given county is a significant predictive factor for rates of execution by
police today. Previously, I talked about the history still
tied to the noose, the thousands of murders that erased the line between mob violence
and legally sanctioned death sentences. But the problem was never the noose, the humanity
of white supremacist lynchings couldn’t have been solved if they opted for a more
gentle delivery of death. The legacy of legalized murder instead presents
itself most clearly in who was allowed to wield it; from the earliest slave patrols
to unofficially sanctioned vigilante mobs to modern-day cops. The trick in shifting a state’s violence
from a collective like the justice system to theoretically individual actors like cops
is pulling two contradictory moves simultaneously. The process of deciding who lives and who
dies becomes more invisible; legal precedent, evolving cultural norms, the role of everyday
citizens on juries or as advocates, all of this disappears when the execution is performed
at the impulse of a group immune to consequences. And yet, the power and untouchability of the
state gains extreme visibility, recorded on security footage, cell phones, hell, the cops’
own bodycams. Does heightened visibility bring increased
scrutiny? I guess, but when the results of that scrutiny
are ballooning budgets and a kill count that continues to go up year over year, it feels
like state violence has instead made itself inescapable, every headline, news station,
and social media inundated with the implied message that this institution can simply do
whatever it wants. Late in his book, Austin Sarat writes that
for as prevalent as they are, botched executions only account for a minor amount of movement
within the larger trend of the death penalty. He attributes their lack of major cultural
impact to the coverage of such events. Write-ups of horrific executions treated the
botchings as individual mistakes, flubs made by a single staff member. Even the repeated failures of an execution
method couldn’t raise the question of systemic injustice, because the inherent justice of
capital punishment was a foregone conclusion. Working backwards from the assumption of justice
is also how we run into the narrative over and over that a murder by the cops was the
right call, the only call they could have made. In a sense, it’s a narrative that makes
every subsequent arm of the justice system almost redundant. Why spend so much time, effort, and deliberation
on this question when a third party could make all those decisions for us? Finally, we’ve removed ourselves from barbarity…by
simply delegating the barbarism to a system responsible only to itself. This video does not mark the beginning of
my interest in capital punishment; nor even, is it the first time I’ve written about
it. 9 years ago, in a college course on the death
penalty, I wrote an essay about the failures of lethal injection. At the time, I remember being very proud of
it. I still have it saved, but haven’t read
it since I turned it in; or, I hadn’t, until just now. [“Deciding whether or not to use capital
punishment was only one of the choices the states had to make. The method of execution was also left to their
discretion.”] On a new video exclusive to Nebula, you can
watch me “perform” this essay in the same way that I do with my written work now, except
this performance is my first reading of it in almost a decade. Then, after reading, I go through and deconstruct
the essay, talking about what it does well, does poorly, and how I would better format
it to fit video. [“You have to lay so much groundwork to
essentially say the one new observation you have. The essay gets to that idea too late.”] Nebula is a creator-owned and operated streaming
service that lets me do things like this. Free of the constant pressure to only make
things that suit the algorithm, Nebula allows me to revisit my old writing, or make a lasagna,
or fill an essay with content-necessary licensed music. And when you sign up for Nebula with my code,
you’re not just getting access to these videos, you’re directly, monetarily supporting
me. As I said in the beginning, if you want to
see more essays like this, Nebula is maybe the best way to make sure I and others have
a stable place to create them. My exclusive companion to this video is nearly
30 minutes long. If my college essay is great, you simply get
another quality thing from me. If it hasn’t held up so well, you can hear
me be critical of its failings and get an insight into how I write now. And in any case, you’ll be ensuring that
work like this has a place to exist. I think that’s as good a reason to sign
up as any.
I can’t believe they’d rather use the electric chair, noose, and injection over methods like the firing squad. It seems like that’s far quicker. Although I think the concept of execution is flawed init of itself
If you have nebula the companion piece is also pretty good.
So much unnecessary suffering due to the desire to have the condemned conscious. Would be trivially easy to just have him drift off under sedation beforehand.
I don't believe in Capital Punishment (too often we find out someone on Death Row is innocent) but if it's going to be done we should minimize suffering involved.
went and watched some firing squad videos as a comparison for timing and the bodies totally slump over within about 5 to 7 seconds. they’re probably unconscious sooner than that as it takes a little bit to awkwardly slump over when you’re tied to a pole
seems like the best of all worlds. quick death but also forces society to face how there’s nothing chill about executions