Join us Thurs., Apr. 23, 6 pm for an evening of discussion with Corinna Barrett Lain on her book Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection (NYU Press, $30).
About the book:
Lethal injection is nothing like what people think. This is its untold story.
In the popular imagination, lethal injection is a slight pinch and a swift nodding off to forever-sleep. It is performed by well-qualified medical professionals. It is regulated and carefully conducted. And it usually provides a “humane” death. In reality, however, not one of those things is true.
Secrets of the Killing State pulls back the curtain on this clandestine punishment practice, presenting a view of lethal injection that states have worked hard to hide. Botched executions are a part of this story, but they are just the tip of the iceberg. For all the suffering that we see, there is also suffering that we don’t see. Indeed, the story told here is even bigger than the executions themselves, for behind the scenes is where it unfolds. Fake science, torturous drugs, inept executioners, prison problems, and decades of state secrecy have created an execution method hard-wired to go wrong in countless ways.
The story of lethal injection is a story of gross incompetence, law breaking, torturous deaths, and a stunning indifference to the way in which human beings die at the hands of the state. These are the secrets of the killing state—all that we know from litigation files, scientific studies, investigative journalism, autopsy reports, interviews, and scholarship across a number of fields. Death penalty expert Corinna Barrett Lain uses this groundbreaking journey into the dark reality of lethal injection to shine a light on the American death penalty more broadly and show that the state at its most powerful moment is also the state at its worst.
We are now over 45 years into the lethal injection era, and most Americans still have no idea what states are doing in their name. It’s time they found out.
About the author:
CORINNA BARRETT LAIN is the George E. Allen Chair in law at the University of Richmond School of Law. She is one of the nation’s leading authorities on the death penalty, presenting her work at national and international conferences and publishing in the top law journals in the country. She is also one of the leading voices on criminal justice in Virginia more broadly, lecturing at annual conferences for the bench and bar and serving as the principal co-author of Thompson-West’s Virginia Practice Series on criminal law, a four-volume treatise that serves as the authoritative guide for Virginia criminal law and procedure. Lain is a former prosecutor, former sergeant in the Army, and recipient of the University of Richmond’s Distinguished Educator Award, the highest award that the University bestows.
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