Abstract
In this article, we interrogate the entanglement of technology with the moral dilemmas of capital punishment in the United States. Although death is obviously front and center of capital punishment, it is often backgrounded analytically speaking, serving as a looming backdrop that rarely makes it to the center of analysis. For the purposes of this article, however, death is an important focal point precisely because it is the direct target of execution technology and also the most crucial element implicated when something goes wrong with executions. Using the introduction of new execution technology (the electric chair, the gas chamber, and lethal injection) in every state as our empirical case, we enhance our understanding of the promises and perils of new execution technology by showing how the boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable executions get redrawn with each new technology, thus undermining the prospects of a technological solution to the dilemmas with capital punishment. We argue that technology cannot fix capital punishment and that is because the problem, at its root, is not about how efficiently and painlessly we kill but instead the fact that we kill at all. And this, we conclude, is a moral, not technological, problem.
Personal Reflexive Statements
Annulla Linders: When I arrived in the United States some three decades ago, the practicing death penalty was one of the things that struck me as especially incomprehensible. Having grown up in Sweden, which staged its last execution in 1910, the death penalty was lumped together in my mind with burning at the stake, crucifixion, and drawing and quartering. It was a premodern penalty more suitable for oppressive monarchical regimes than supposedly enlightened modern democracies. To me, it was morally unambiguous—state-sponsored killing was wrong, as simple as that. So how could it still be practiced in the United States? This is the basic question that has inspired much of my work on the death penalty. While the big answer still eludes me—perhaps because there is no big answer but instead, as many fellow sociologists have already demonstrated, a series of half-answers linked to normal sociological explanations pertaining to social, political, and cultural institutions—I have come to believe that attention to the twin-processes of practice and meaning-making are crucial for understanding capital punishment in the United States. Executing people is something we do and also something we make sense of—calling what we do “executions” rather than “killings,” for example, tells us something important. While my moral conviction about the wrongness of the death penalty is intact, the issues we address of this article have nonetheless been difficult to deal with. Given the evidence, it is easy to be critical, even cynical, of the many attempts throughout history to device more efficient killing methods. But it is also undeniable that crude, clumsy, and faulty execution equipment can cause quite a bit of suffering for those who are subject to it. Is it wrong, then, to try to alleviate that suffering? Moreover, for most of history, those whose responsibility it is to carry out the death sentences that come their way through a long, complex, and winding system of voters, politicians, victims, prosecutors, juries, judges, and governors must confront the reality, not just the symbolism, of killing. They kill for us. Is it wrong, then, that they should do so in a manner gentle enough that it does not put them under undue strain and does not leave their hands literary bloody?
Shobha Pai Kansal: When I began graduate school, I became particularly interested in how systems and structures organize much, if not all, of the circumstances around us. One example of organized, state-sanctioned behavior, of interest to me, is that of capital punishment. Being involved in this research has afforded me the opportunity to understand how the practice of the death penalty in the United States has evolved and changed over time. Much like many other laws and practices in in this country, the death penalty allows the power structure of the state to be kept intact. Furthermore, I have been intrigued by the social spectacle that executions have been. From media announcements of state-sanctioned killings to the demonstrative public displays of actual punishments, there is a social element that cannot be ignored in this very public process of the ending of human life at the hands of the state. I often wonder about the conflicting role the state plays in both protecting and extinguishing human life and how humanity is treated within the twin processes of life preservation and life destruction.
Kyle Shupe: I’ve always found capital punishment to be a particularity abhorrent practice. Everything about the death penalty seems to me diametrically opposed to the values of a liberal democracy. Yet 63 percent of American adults believe the practice is morally justified for serious crimes, even though many more (71 percent) believe there’s a risk that innocent people will be wrongly executed by the state (Pew Research Center 2015). Based on these reports, some people believe capital punishment is an ethical punishment that may kill innocents. Thus, the continued support for capital punishment fascinates and concerns me. While working as a research assistant for Dr. Linders, I’ve learned the death penalty is rife with contradiction as the state and public seek ways to humanely execute people. Understanding how state actors, journalists, and members of the public rationalize and justify executions is integral to ending capital punishment. Our article, I believe, provides a modest contribution towards this effort by demonstrating the historical social practices justifying “humane” execution technologies and the inhumane consequences of botched executions brought about by them.
Samuel Oakley: Growing up in a conservative leaning, law-and-order-mentality home with a prosecutor father meant that I was exposed to capital punishment at a rather early age. Whether it was reading over cases, watching crime documentaries, or hearing the story behind my father’s “Old Sparky” mug referencing the famous Ohio electric chair, discussions of executions were part of my upbringing. While I do not remotely share the political views or leaning of my family and am against the death penalty, I find the history, technology, and pageantry of executions in the United States morbidly fascinating. I am intrigued by the technological advancement to make killing “more ethical” and fascinated by the efforts to develop execution techniques meant to alleviate the guilt of executioners. I became fascinated by the question of how we understand the juxtaposition of “ethical” and painless execution against the spectacle meant to be a form of crime deterrence?
Early in the morning of March 16, 1984, North Carolina staged its first execution in 23 years, and it did so with a new killing method, lethal injection. This made North Carolina only the second state in the nation, after Texas, to use lethal injection as a method of execution. 1 North Carolina was no stranger to new execution methods—it was one of only three states (the other two are Mississippi and New Mexico) to have used both electrocution and lethal gas—but the path to lethal injection had still not been entirely smooth. The issue was not that people had doubts about its efficiency, on the contrary. Already when lethal injection was first proposed in 1979, before it had been used anywhere, some legislators worried that it would “make capital punishment more palatable to the public” ( Rocky Mountain Telegram 1979 ). When the issue reappeared before the legislature in 1983, after Texas had already inaugurated the method, the general opinion was that lethal injection was “indisputably the least gruesome, easiest method of capital punishment” and in that sense much preferable to “the image of a man choking in a gas chamber or frying in the electric chair (The Daily Tar Hill 1983). But, a newspaper pondered, herein also lies the method’s “danger” ( The Daily Tar Hill 1983). Precisely because it was “less painful [and] more dignified,” it would be “to sugar-coat for juries exactly what they’re doing…killing [the convicts]” ( Asheville Citizen-Times 1983). In the end, the legislature adopted a bill that would give convicts a choice between the gas chamber and lethal injection, as if such a choice somehow alleviated the state’s responsibility in the matter. 2 The first inmate to make this choice was James Hutchins, and he chose lethal injection. By all accounts, it was an unproblematic execution. Although witnesses to the execution observed some “very, very slight, almost imperceptible movements” and thought they heard Hutchins “mumble as he lay on the gurney,” a Department of Corrections spokesperson announced that the execution “was carried out smoothly and without incident,” with Hutchins declared dead 15 minutes after the deadly chemicals first entered his body ( Rocky Mountain Telegram 1984b).
There were anti-death penalty protests in Raleigh, of course, and as much legal wrangling as Hutchins’ lawyers could muster, but all in all it was a fairly unremarkable execution despite the fact that it was the first North Carolina execution in 23 years and Hutchins the first person in the state to be killed by a lethal dose of drugs. But as such, it is a useful execution with which to introduce this article, which deals with the promises and perils of new execution technology. It was only a few years earlier, in 1977, that executions had resumed after a 10-year nationwide hiatus while the courts tried to sort through the question of capital punishment’s constitutionality (Mandery 2013; Steiker and Steiker 2016). And, while the death penalty states were clearly eager to bring back executions or at least the possibility of executions, there was also a fairly strong movement underway to try to prevent that from happening (Haines 1992). Moreover, both the electric chair and the gas chamber had long lost their earlier associations with modernity and technological advancement; their reputations irreparably damaged by too many horror stories of struggling, straining, gagging, wheezing, gurgling, and burning bodies that took too long to die (Sarat et al. 2014).
Hence, the time was ripe for new execution technology. As with electricity almost a century earlier (Brandon 1999; Essig 2003), and gas some decades later (Chan 1975; Christianson 2010), the lethal injection method was adopted by legislators before they knew how it would work or even if it would work. As an execution method, it was “Unknown [and] Untried,” displaying “a curious combination of modern technology and archaic ritual” ( Rocky Mount Telegram 1982). But, what it also shared with its predecessors was the promise of a bloodless death that would not horrify witnesses, not offend the sensibilities of the public, and not defile the officialdom that accomplished it; that is, the promise of an execution without flaws (Haines 1992; Kaufman-Osborn 2009).
In this article, we pose the following question on these developments: To what extent does new execution technology solve the problems of flawed executions? We are not posing this as a question with an unequivocal objective answer. In fact, as the analysis shows, the dilemmas are such that an objective answer would be impossible to arrive at, and this is so because the flaws themselves are attached to the very technologies designed to alleviate them. In this sense, technological innovations bring about a set of new risks around which organizational practices are arranged and from which new technological failures arise (Rothstein 2006). Such failures, however, are less about technology itself than the culture and practices it is embedded in (Vaughan 1996).
Rather than focusing on the new sets of practices that emerge with new technology, we are interested in the process whereby new execution technology is continuously construed as one of the primary solutions to the many dilemmas associated with capital punishment in the modern democratic state (Kaufman-Osborn 2002). In many ways, of course, changes in execution technology align fairly well with the other major changes that capital punishment has undergone over the past two centuries, including especially those aimed at limiting the use of capital punishment and curtailing the spectacular features of executions (Banner 2002; Foucault [1975] 1995; Hartung 1952). But in other ways, the more specific focus on execution technology foregrounds a somewhat different set of issues than those inspiring more policy-driven scholarship (Garland 2010). In short, it places the analytical spotlight on the killing itself which somehow must be accomplished, by someone, and in some manner. And, it must be done in such a way as to clearly distinguish it from the illegal killings the law is avenging.
Using newspaper coverage of the first execution in each state with a new execution technology (electricity, gas, and lethal drugs) as our evidentiary foundation, we focus on the ongoing tension between the promises and perils of new execution technology. The analysis demonstrates how changes to execution technology shift the expectations and legitimacy of capital punishment by redrawing the boundary—and this is a moral boundary—between acceptable and unacceptable death that the new technology was originally designed to protect. In other words, the development of new technology as a solution to problems with the death penalty gives rise to new problems that keep propelling the search for a “technological fix” forward (Rosner 2004; also Perrow 1984), but in so doing, they also cement the deeply embedded assumption that a technological fix is possible (Downer 2011). Our overall argument, then, is that the problems with capital punishment cannot be resolved with the help of new technology and that is so because the problems technology is tasked with resolving are, at their root, neither technological (linked to equipment and techniques) nor social (linked to practices and procedures) but instead moral.
The moral dilemma we focus on here concerns the killing itself. As a moral dilemma, it is rooted in the Enlightenment which challenged proscribed inequality, oppressive authority, and excessive punishment (Beccaria [1767] 1963). Organized around the then radical assumption that men—(and they meant men, Wollstonecraft [1792] 1971)—were fundamentally equal and hence endowed with equal rights, including a right to life (Paine [1791] 1985). The notion that human life is inviolable has had dramatic consequences for the debate around capital punishment (Mackey 1976). If killing is wrong, can it ever be right to take life as punishment? The larger political and philosophical debates over this issue go far beyond the scope of this article (Bedau 1997; Martinez et al. 2002), but they are an important subtext for understanding the near constant pressures over the past 200 years on the death penalty (D. B. Davis 1957; Haines 1992). Speaking generally, these pressures have pushed capital punishment debate and policy in three different directions—one toward curtailing the use of the death penalty, including outright abolition (Galliher et al. 2002); another toward correcting systemic as well as arbitrary inequities in who gets executed for what reasons (Ogletree and Sarat 2006); and a third one toward fixing executions, which is the focus of this article. All these strands of the capital punishment debate are saturated with moral dilemmas, including especially deeply engrained racial inequities that have long affected, in myriad ways, the process whereby some people end up on death row and are eventually executed (Allen and Clubb 2008; Maratea 2019; Ogletree and Sarat 2006).
The Death Penalty and Execution Technology
This is not the place to engage the voluminous literature on the precarious position of capital punishment in the modern democratic state (Garland 2010; Paternoster 1991; Sarat 2001). Rather, our focus is on the execution itself and the ways in which death is accomplished. Evans (1996), in his study of the history of capital punishment in Germany, observes that In dealing with a subject such as capital punishment, we have to remind ourselves that this is more than a mere debate, more than a simple set of cultural interpretations. People, in the end, were being killed by the state, bloodily, messily, and often in large numbers. (Evans 1996:23)
3
Following Foucault ([1975] 1995), the restructuring of the death penalty has productively been understood as an expression of the rationalization processes that swept the Western world in the eighteenth century (Kaufman-Osborn 2002; Madow 1995). Approaching capital punishment from a more cultural perspective, other scholars have linked the transformation of capital punishment to various changes in the realm of culture, including especially bourgeois sentiments that made the violence of executions increasingly intolerable to watch (Masur 1989; Spierenburg 1984). As general accounts of the transformation of capital punishment, neither of these approaches are designed to explain the extensive variations that characterize developments in different nations nor are they designed to explain changes in execution technology. This is in large part because most developed democracies have responded to the large-scale pressures on the death penalty by abandoning it altogether rather than refining the procedures and methods whereby they accomplish the death of convicts. In this respect, the development in the United States is a clear exception even though, overall, there is more alignment than divergence in a comparison of capital punishment developments in the United States and its European peer nations (Garland 2010).
The exceptional status of the United States when it comes to execution technology, however, provides an opportunity to enhance our understanding of the more general pressures on capital punishment in the modern democratic state that have produced a number of significant variations in laws and execution procedures. In what follows, we address two interrelated aspects of the transformation of executions that, more or less directly, implicate our understanding of changes in killing technology. The first of these aspects refers to the rationalization of death which resulted in more efficient and quicker methods of killing. The second aspect refers to the body of the convict and involves a growing concern for pain and suffering.
The Rationalization of Executions
Considering the sweeping nature of technological change over the past 200 years, it is not surprising that much of the scholarship on the transformation of executions, including execution technology, has focused on one of its primary drivers—rationalization (Madow 1995; Rosa 2013). The emphasis on efficiency and rationality that derives from Foucault’s general analysis of the transformation of punishment (1995) leads seamlessly into an account of the development of execution technology that accomplishes death efficiently, swiftly, and reliably. The guillotine, praised in its days as an “unfailing machine,” is the paradigmatic example here (Jones-Imhotep 2017:22; Smith 2008). But while clearly important for understanding the overarching links between modernity and technological innovation, as a conceptual tool, rationalization is too blunt to capture some of the significant variations that characterize technological change within specific institutional settings, including the criminal justice system. Such a sweeping view of how rationality works is “excessively tidy” in that it not only screens out “failed alternatives” but also mutes contestation and smooths out the often messy process whereby things technological get done (Staudenmaier 1994:263). Moreover, as analysts, we risk missing not only technological variations but also, and more importantly for our purposes, the interpretive processes that drive the narrative of progressive rationality and that are considerably more dynamic and open-ended when deployed in particular cases than we would expect from a bird’s-eye view of historical change (Linders 2018).
Thus, an analysis of changing execution technology, we suggest, must interrogate not only the entanglement of technology with the larger social forces that transformed the death penalty into a modern, rationalized practice (Neustadter 1989) but also the more open-ended moral–cultural dilemmas of the practice of capital punishment that has turned the staging and accomplishing the killing of human beings into a morally fraught act. Moreover, although death is obviously front and center of capital punishment, it is often backgrounded analytically speaking, serving as a looming backdrop that rarely makes it to the center of analysis (Evans 1996). For the purposes of this article, however, death is an important focal point precisely because it is the key target of execution technology and also the most crucial element implicated when something goes wrong with executions. In other words, even though death is the outcome of the vast majority of execution attempts, it remains stubbornly unpredictable.
The Body in Executions
As Foucault ([1975] 1995) so dramatically has demonstrated, the target of the spectacular public punishments was precisely the body. The infliction of pain—physical suffering—was long the purpose of punishment rather than an unfortunate byproduct (Banner 2002; McGowen 2011). And, when death was the end goal of punishment, it was quite literally the body to be destroyed. Over the course of the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, however, the focus of penal intervention shifted from body to soul. And yet, because the soul was trapped in the body, the body remained implicated in punishment, albeit in a different way (Garland 2011b; Kaufman-Osborn 2009). The most significant expression of this shift was the development of the penitentiary, which was designed to encourage contemplation and penance (Foucault [1975] 1995). The physical body, although encaged, was not simply left alone but also cared for, as if proper penitence required a body unmarred by pain and physical depletion.
As the “last remaining penalty that accomplishes its purpose via the deliberate and direct infliction of harm upon the body,” the death penalty came to occupy an uneasy position in this new penal regime (Kaufman-Osborn 2002:143). In an age when individual lives gained in value, both symbolically and materially (Zelizer 1985), the deliberate taking of life by the state became increasingly extraordinary and was deemed appropriate for fewer and fewer transgressions (McManners 1985; Thompson 1975). And yet, it is a fairly recent development, historically speaking, that death itself—beyond the violence of killing—became a problem. This was so for a number of reasons, including the secularization of life, the development of alternate penal methods, a growing emphasis on individualism and the self, the expulsion of death from the life of the living (Ariès 1974; Evans 1998; Howarth 2007), and, not the least, improved medical science that turned pain into something to be combated rather than endured (Pernick 1985).
If the absence of pain is viewed as a key element of acceptable state-sponsored killings, then executions that produce pain are, almost by definition, unacceptable, as if pain to the convict is the unequivocal physical and moral border that executioners must not traverse (cf. Brieger 2004). And when they do, the entire institution of capital punishment—the legal right to kill—is called into question. Hence, the importance of technology that can accomplish death efficiently, reliably, and painlessly (Garland 2011a). And yet, as long as death was spectacularly visible—the guillotine, after all, was also efficient, reliable, and painless—it remained steeped in unacceptable barbarism. It is, therefore, not incidental that the development of new execution technology has aimed at producing death in such a way that the outer layers of the body are unharmed. As the analysis in this article shows, it was at this juncture—growing concerns for pain and increased squeamishness over death—that the promise of clean and efficient technological solutions to a disagreeable and often unseemly duty took hold among observers, managers, scientists, and policy makers alike. And yet, we argue here, it is a promise that cannot be fulfilled, regardless of technological prowess. Technology certainly can reduce the time to death and help ensure—although never guarantee—a painless death, but it cannot alleviate the fundamental dilemma of killing itself. 4
In what follows, we first discuss issues of data and methodology and then describe our empirical case, which is a comparison of discourse surrounding the introduction of new execution methods in the United States (the electric chair, the gas chamber, and lethal injection). We organize the discussion around three major themes (killing efficiently, killing invisibly, and killing painlessly) that, each in its own way, highlights the unbridgeable tension between the promises and perils of new execution technology. It is in this light, we conclude that the perpetual but ultimately futile search for a morally acceptable execution method can best be understood.
Data and Methods
Focusing on the discourse surrounding the development and introduction of new execution technology, our primary data source is newspaper accounts of the first execution conducted with a new technology in all American death penalty jurisdictions. Such stories frequently include comparisons with old technology as well as speculations about the problems that the new technology will solve. A second and much less systematic data pool includes miscellaneous stories of executions marred by technological mishaps. Given the difficulties associated with establishing an objective definition of bungled executions, we rely on the claims of various observers for the identification of such executions.
For the purposes of this article, we are primarily treating newspaper accounts of executions as proxies for the larger debate surrounding execution technology specifically and capital punishment more generally. It is important to keep in mind, however, that news media do not simply reflect such debates but also actively participate in constructing the ideas and understandings they represent and channel, both in terms of content (Roslyng and Eskjær 2017) and agenda setting (Hilgartner and Bosk 1988).
The identification of the target executions is greatly facilitated by a data set assembled by Espy and Smykla (1994) of all American executions up till the early 1990s and which includes information about the methods of execution. To locate more contemporary executions, we rely on the resources provided by the Death Penalty Information Center (www.deathpenaltyinfo.org). With the help of the historical newspaper archives at the Library of Congress, we have gathered newspaper stories—as local as possible—of all statewide “firsts” when it comes to electrocution and lethal gas. We also have made use of various online newspaper archives (e.g., Proquest, Newspapers.com, Chicago Defender) to fill in gaps in the data set. This is so especially for executions by lethal injection. Table 1 provides an overview of the primary data set we have assembled of news articles of first executions across states and execution types.
News Coverage of the First Execution in a State with New Technology, 1890–2007.
Our coding strategy was both deductive and inductive. Drawing on existing scholarship, we searched for elements that capture a larger story of rationalization and then let the data speak to us about how these elements give meaning to the stories they are part of. These procedures yielded a long list of codes that speak to both the promises and perils of execution technology. The most important codes signaling promises include speed, efficiency, modernity, progress, technological advancement, new machinery, painlessness, humanitarianism, reliability, unharmed bodies, and less gruesome to watch. The perils codes include various aspects of bungled executions (pain, blood, incompetence, faulty equipment), other mishaps, technological difficulties, the death struggle, mismatch between visual cues of the death process and expert opinions, and—of growing significance over time—the disturbing ease of killing and watching someone die. From these sets of codes, and in conversation with the existing literature, we developed three overlapping analytical themes where the tensions between the promises and perils are most starkly revealed: (1) killing efficiently, (2) killing invisibly, and (3) killing painlessly. The final discussion keys in on the insoluble tension between technological exuberance (new and shiny things, automation, and exacting professionalism) and technological misgivings (problems of failure, dehumanization, and deflection of responsibility).
New Execution Technology: Promises and Perils
Up till the mid nineteenth century (and later in many jurisdictions), executions were typically lengthy affairs that took many hours to complete. There were long processions, sometimes accompanied by music, to the place of execution during which the convicts, surrounded by the multitude, were often perched atop the coffins they would later be placed in for burial; there were extensive religious ceremonies, with sermons, prayers, and hymns; there was commerce and entertainment on the grounds, political speeches, and sometimes lengthy final statements by the convicts; and then there were the 30–45 minutes that the dying body was hanging from the scaffold for all to see (Banner 2002; Masur 1989). In the beginning of the twentieth century, and in sharp contrast, executions were mostly conducted in enclosed spaces, in front of small groups of witnesses, and were more likely to be counted in minutes than hours. There was still extensive variation across execution locales, but a new emphasis on speed and efficiency, ranging from arrangements to time-to-death measures, is unmistaken also in accounts of executions that lingered in the spectacular past.
This transformation captures several concerns related to the retreat from the spectacle in favor of more efficient executions. Central to these concerns was the manner of which death was accomplished. It was not so much that the hanging method was not up to the job—after all, thousands of convicts had been killed by the method—but instead that hangings were increasingly viewed as crude and unreliable and often produced lengthy death struggles that were painful to behold (Neustadter 1989). In short, “the hangman’s rope” was increasingly deemed “a clumsy device even in expert hands” (Keating 1888:236). Execution managers did what they could to improve the hanging method (Banner 2002)—by inventing new hanging machines, building better scaffolds and mechanizing the trap doors in various ways, calculating the optimal length of the drop, sometimes hiring professional hangmen, and in general training their personnel better for the job—but in the end, it was difficult to safeguard against everything that could go wrong in a hanging.
It was in this context that the promise of more efficient execution methods took hold. Medical scientists had long discussed alternate methods of executions, primary among them were various lethal ingestible products and poisonous gases (Linders 2002), but it was not until the lethal aspects of electricity were discovered that a technologically advanced and organizationally doable method started to take shape. 5 What this new technology promised above all was a quicker and more efficient death process that did not bring pain to the convict and did not upset the witnesses by a gruesome death struggle. First out was New York which inaugurated the electrical method in 1890. 6 Nothing, a newspaper observed after the switch to electricity, could “induce this State to go back to the practice of choking criminals to death with a rope…[Hanging] is a crude method derived from a barbarous past, and science has devised a much more effective and decent way of putting to death” ( New York Times 1890). The next innovation in execution technology was execution by lethal gas, first used by Nevada in 1924. 7 This method, which is “unique in the annals of civilization, robs capital punishment of much of its horrors” ( Nevada State Journal 1924). In Colorado, similarly, advocates of the gas chamber expressed relief that “the crude contraption of pulleys, weights and rope” would “never again…be called onto service of the state to snuff out life” ( Rocky Mountain News 1933). Finally, in 1982, Texas inaugurated lethal injection as a new execution method. 8 The advantage of this method was that instead of “suffering electric shock and burns and gagging on poison gas the victim simply drifts off in a trance” ( New York Times 1982a).
As we discuss below, the introduction of new execution technology was typically accompanied by laudatory evaluations by experts, execution managers, and other observers who were impressed by the promise of the new technology to deliver quick, painless, and invisible death. However, precisely because of their entanglement with technology these promises were simultaneously perils that, at any given moment, could turn an otherwise well-managed execution into an embarrassment. The particulars of mishaps obviously changed from technology to technology—the problems with ropes, nooses, and trap doors, for example, effectively disappeared when the electric chair and the gas chamber replaced the gallows—but new technology inevitably produced new risks, both in terms of the mechanics of death and expectations on the death process. The range of potential mishaps associated with new execution technology, however, was difficult for execution managers to fully anticipate, as their objective was primarily to solve the problems associated with old technology.
In what follows, we discuss three themes that more fully bring out the tensions between the promises and perils of new execution technology: killing efficiently, killing invisibly, and killing painlessly. While we keep the themes separate for analytical purposes, the processes and interpretive work they capture are deeply entangled in one another, both analytically and practically.
Killing Efficiently
Throughout the nineteenth century, newspaper accounts of hanging executions were filled with reports of nooses that slipped, ropes that broke, trap doors that got stuck, drops that were too short or too long, and any number of other technical mishaps that marred executions, either by causing suffering to the convict or by offending the expectations and sensibilities of the audience (Linders 2002; Sarat et al. 2014). The fact that the reporting of mishaps increased over the nineteenth century should not, however, be taken as evidence that the number of execution mishaps also increased. Rather, as expectations on executions in terms of efficiency became increasingly entrenched, an increasing number of execution incidents became entangled in those expectations. In other words, the meaning of such incidents changed as efforts to prevent them increased. Most importantly and speaking generally, they moved from being viewed as unpredictable accidents to preventable consequences of mismanagement and/or faulty technology (Beck 1992; Mohun 2013, 2016). As quick and efficient deaths became seen as accomplishments of professional management and effective technology rather than strokes of luck, struggling and straining bodies almost per definition signaled failure. It was in this context that the search for a new and rational way to kill emerged.
As a method that corresponded “with the scientific progress of the age” ( Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 1884), electricity promised “instantaneous death, without pain to the criminal and without disfiguring the body” (Keating 1888:236). If the evaluations of the inaugural electrical execution in New York were mixed—ranging from “Electrocution Proves a Success” ( Evening Star 1890) to “Death by Torture” ( New York Herald 1890)—the subsequent adoption of electrocution in other states seemed to confirm, at least initially, the promise of electricity as a method of execution. The unanimous conclusion among observers of Ohio’s first electrocution in 1897 was that this was a “Decided Success” ( Cincinnati Enquirer 1897) that vindicated “all arguments in favor of this form of capital punishment” ( Columbus Evening Press 1897). The method was “immeasurably superior to the rope” ( Columbus Evening Press 1897) in that it produced death in a “flash” (Cincinnati Enquirer 1897) and was unaccompanied by “horrible features” ( Columbus Evening Press 1897). In Massachusetts, observers generally agreed that the first electrocution “was successful in every way” ( Boston Morning Journal 1901) and that the death produced by electricity was “certain, painless, and immediate” ( Boston Evening Transcript 1901). In New Jersey, observers were especially impressed by the “almost impossible” speed whereby “trained hands adjusted the straps and head pieces” and ensured death within six minutes of the convict having entered the execution room ( The Morning Star and Newark Advertiser 1907). In South Carolina, the first electrical execution that killed William Reed in less than five minutes was “quick and certain” ( The News and Courier 1912) and “carried out without a hitch, death being almost instantaneous” ( The State 1912). Finally, in North Carolina, when Lee Washington was killed in the electric chair he “sat down, and presently was dead, giving but little resistance to the current” ( News and Observer 1923).
Despite the generally favorable reports of the inauguration of electrocution, it did not take long for the new method to lose some of its sheen as a rational and unassailable method of execution. Not only did the execution process not always work as swiftly and efficiently as was promised, occasionally requiring five or six jolts of electricity, but then there was the sickening odor of burning flesh, the wheezing of the lungs, and the disturbing flames that occasionally licked the convicts’ bodies (Seitz 2006). Such disquieting elements were, of course, part of the method from the start (Solotaroff 2001), but they were pushed to the background, buried under the exuberance that accompanied the replacement of the crude and dingy-looking gallows with brand new technology. Once time, routine, aging electrical contraptions, and—most importantly—expectations of swift and efficient death brought them to the forefront again, they could no longer be ignored. Hence, it is not surprising that the idea of a quick and efficient death that did not offend the sensibilities of the spectators kept inspiring the development of new execution technology.
As with electrocution, the inaugural execution by lethal gas in Nevada, of Gee Jon, was widely praised (Chan 1975). Observers in Colorado, the second state to adopt lethal gas, called the first gas execution there a “complete success” and “the most humane and probably the speediest” in the state’s history—the victim, William Kelley, “apparently died in about 30 seconds”( Fort Collins Coloradoan 1934b). Arizona built a “tiny, air-tight box” inside a larger chamber as a substitute of “the hemp and the noose, and the steel of the trap” ( Arizona Republic 1934), and in this box, two young men, Fred and Manuel Hernandez, died from inhaling lethal gas on July 6, 1934. According to the physicians, who watched through an observation window and used “elongated stethoscopes” to monitor the death struggle, both men were dead within three minutes ( Tucson Daily Citizen 1934). When Wyoming tested its gas chamber on a pig, “it operated swiftly and efficiently” ( Wyoming State Tribune 1937a). A month later, death came in an equally “speedy manner” to Perry Carroll, the first person to die in Wyoming’s “chamber of doom” ( Wyoming State Tribune 1937b). If it was generally agreed “that the lethal gas execution was more satisfactory than hanging,” the warden who oversaw Oregon’s first lethal gas execution was especially “gratified by the dispatch with which the device” killed its victim ( The News-Review 1939). As with the electric chair, then, the marvels associated with gleaming and futuristic-looking gas chambers fitted with forests of wires, levers, and mechanical arms, all prominently pictured in the press, at first seemed to confirm a new and more rational era in the delivery of the death penalty (Christianson 2010). In this regard, the reference to California’s gas chamber as the state’s “new death factory” is apropos, even if not meant as praise ( San Francisco Examiner 1938a).
But here too, the accumulation of stories describing lengthy death struggles, accompanied by sometimes very unpleasant and highly visible responses by bodies to being choked to death, soon soiled the promise of lethal gas as the modern solution to the woes of the death penalty, as the following brief examples illustrate. In Mississippi, it took at least six minutes to kill Gerald Gallego in the state’s “new lethal gas chamber,” and during those minutes, he “trembled, then he convulsed again and again. Beads of perspiration broke on his forehead as his head…bounded back hard against an iron exhaust pipe immediately behind his chair” ( Clarion-Ledger 1955b). During his execution in California’s gas chamber in 1967, Aaron Mitchell’s “head jerked in hideous spasms [and] his chest heaved violently” as he breathed in the lethal gas ( Chicago Defender 1967).
By the end of the twentieth century, the electric chair and the gas chamber, both lauded as technological wonders and humanitarian victories when they were first introduced, had been practically abandoned even though they have never unequivocally been deemed unconstitutional. 9 In their place, lethal injection has emerged as the preferred execution method nationwide. In many states, the inauguration of lethal injection coincided with the reintroduction of the death penalty in the late 1970s 10 after a 10-year nationwide hiatus on executions. This means, first, that the resumption of executions—in some states after several decades—was bigger news than the particulars of the method used and, second, that the debate over lethal injection, more so than in the past, was firmly entangled with the debate over the death penalty itself. Moreover, by the time of lethal injection, members of the medical community 11 were considerably less likely than before to want to be associated with the death penalty (Haines 1989; Litton 2013; Troug and Brennan 1993), with the consequence that the scientific exuberance that characterized and boosted the introduction of gas and electricity as execution methods has been largely absent from the discussion of lethal injection. Nonetheless, most observers have concluded that lethal injection is a “more humane form of execution” ( Atlanta Journal and Constitution 1991). Witnesses of the first lethal injection execution of Charlie Brooks in Texas, 1982, noted that he “took a long, deep yawn” as the drugs were transmitted though his veins, and “by the time he finished the yawn, he was gone” ( Washington Post 1982). However, as we discuss further below, not all lethal injection executions have lived up to their promise of a morally acceptable death. But, on the whole, the method more effectively conceals the death struggle, thus making death largely invisible.
Killing Invisibly
While the production of quick and efficient death was an important goal of new execution technology, swiftness itself was neither the only goal nor sufficient in itself to produce an acceptable death. Such a death should also ideally be accomplished without visible violence, without visible resistance, and without causing visible pain to the convict. In this section, we address various efforts aimed at making death invisible. The stakes here are high and capture the difficulty of staging a deliberate and legal killing that meets all the requirements of efficiency, rationality, professionalism, and human dignity, and that has nothing in common with the murders avenged by the execution other than the fact that someone is dead at the end. It was not only that an invisible death was presumed to be quick and painless but also that executions that produced invisible death were more dignified, as if the invisibility of death—including an invisible killer, an invisible killing agent, and the elimination of visible bodily damage—somehow relieved all those present of the responsibility of the killing. To accomplish such a death, would be “almost like not killing at all” (Keating 1888:236).
It was precisely the ability of electricity to produce death instantly and without leaving a mark on the body that first attracted reformers to the method. Even if the science of death by electricity could as of yet not quite explain what it was about electricity that made it so deadly, the evidence that it was deadly was indisputable by the number of people succumbing after accidental encounters with it (Brandon 1999; Essig 2003; Metzger 1996; Moran 2002). Moreover, the transmission of electricity into the body could be accomplished without violence, with a simple push of a button, and once the electricity was transmitted, it would do its work inside the body, out of sight of the observers. Hence, the prospect of invisible death was built into the very core of death by electricity, an ingredient as important as the oak of the chair and the electrodes designed to transmit the deadly current.
Early depictions of death in the electric chair suggested that electricity could indeed kill invisibly, without leaving a mark on the body, as the following examples illustrate. The autopsy of Frederic McGuire, executed in New York in 1892, “showed that the conditions of the body were almost the same as if the man had died a natural death” ( New York Times 1892). A few months later, the execution of James Hamilton, also in New York, was deemed “the most successful execution” by electricity thus far and that was because “there was none of the awful reflex muscular action…[and] there was not a sign on the body” ( Washington Bee 1893).
And yet, despite the oft-reported absence of any marks on the body, it soon became clear that once the current was applied, its effect on the body could be highly visible and sometimes quite violent. A few examples will suffice. A witness to the 1930 execution of Leonard Shadlow and Lafron Fisher in Illinois describes how Shadlow’s “legs literally fried, while his head baked. Heat blisters as big as eggs formed on different parts of his head” ( Chicago Defender 1930). Fisher too was “frying and baking” and the witnesses could “actually smell flesh burning” ( Chicago Defender 1930). More than half a century later, during the electrocution of Pedro Medina in Florida, 1997, “blue and orange flames up to a foot long” shot from his mask and “the death chamber filled with smoke,” prompting a newspaper to call the execution “barbaric” ( St. Petersburg Times 1997). Such unseemly problems plagued the electrical method till its end (Sarat et al. 2014), as Seitz (2006) has demonstrated in her analysis of North Carolina’s electric chair which describes in gruesome detail the many ways that electrocutions can go wrong.
Just like with electricity when it was first introduced, lethal gas was praised as an invisible agent of death that promised “the gentlest way of death” ( Los Angeles Times 1955) and “an unharmed-looking corpse” (Solotaroff 2001:61). Moreover, lethal gas promised death without any of the unseemly visible features that had come to be associated with electricity—no smoke, no sizzling, no fire, and no burning of the flesh. It was with these advantages in mind that legislatures in several states chose this method over electrocution to much initial promise. According to observers of the nation’s first lethal gas execution in Nevada, the convict “nodded and went to sleep. It was as simple…as that” ( Nevada State Journal 1924). In Colorado, the next state to try the new method, William Kelley, “slumped forward, gasped two or three times, and [then] was still” ( Casper Star-Tribune 1934b). “Death comes in speedy manner in white fumes,” announced a headline after Wyoming’s first lethal gas execution ( Wyoming State Tribune 1937b). The convict, Paul Carroll, “gasped, took three quick breaths and then his head sagged forward” and thus was “Wyoming’s first…execution with lethal gas” successfully completed ( Wyoming State Tribune 1937b). In Mississippi, which had “abandoned its portable electric chair and midnight executions because they became carnival-like” ( The Greenwood Commonwealth 1955), the gas chamber was viewed as more “humane” ( Clarion-Ledger 1955a) because convicts “[j]ust go to sleep and it’s all over” ( Clarion-Ledger 1954).
Despite such early praise, it soon became clear that the gas chamber was not the panacea many had hoped for. When North Carolina replaced the electric chair with the gas chamber, commentators across the state had “hailed the new method as an advance in modern technology that would promote North Carolina’s then-tenuous progressive reputation” (Seitz 2006:119). As it turned out, however, the first execution by lethal gas did little to salvage North Carolina’s reputation. It took 11 minutes to kill the convict, Allen Foster, and he was apparently “conscious for at least three minutes,” shocking those “who watched through a glass window” ( New York Times 1936). In other states too, the inauguration of lethal gas as an execution method did not quite live up to its promise. Although the first lethal gas executions in Missouri were praised for working “quickly and efficiently” ( St. Louis Post-Dispatch 1838), the death that resulted was not nearly as invisible as many had hoped. The first two victims, John Brown and William Wright, “appeared to be fighting for breath” for about “three-quarters of a minute” ( Daily Capital News 1938), and the third, Raymond Boyer, “gasped hard for breath” while his body displayed “muscular reactions…for two minutes” ( St. Louis Globe-Democrat 1938). During the California’s second gas execution, witnesses watched “for endless minutes” as the two convicts “sat gasping, sputtering, coughing, and their heads began rolling” ( San Francisco Examiner 1938b).
It is not surprising, therefore, that once the lethal injection method was becoming reality, the perceptions of the gas chamber, like the electric chair before it, as an unobjectionable method of execution could no longer be sustained (Solotaroff 2001). Instead, lethal injection was “hailed by its proponents as a technological advance, more humane and less barbaric than its predecessors,” which in the past century “were touted as improvements on the gallows” ( Washington Post 1990). And it was precisely the promise of a method that, finally, could produce death without a visible death struggle and without leaving marks on the body that persuaded execution managers to abandon the previously ultramodern technologies that had aged into technological albatrosses. And there is abundant evidence that this promise has been at least partially fulfilled. For example, the first person to be killed by lethal injection in Oklahoma, Charles Coleman, had a “very easy death”; he quickly became “still and remained that way” ( The Daily Oklahoman 1990). When Utah executed Pierre Dale Selby, his “chest heaved twice” after which “his body became quiet, his eyes closed and his heart stopped beating” ( Provo Daily Herald 1987). Once the lethal drugs reached Mark Hopkinson, the first person to be executed by lethal injection in Wyoming, they “quickly took effect, stopping [him] in mid-sentence” ( Casper Star-Tribune 1992). A few months later, in Delaware, death “by injection came quietly and without a fuss” to Steven Pennell ( Wilmington News Journal 1992). A witness to Pennell’s execution observed “his chest heave…and then he appeared to be sleeping”; another witness said of the method that it is “so simple and easy and apparently non-violent” ( Wilmington News Journal 1992). In Arizona, the first lethal injection was “quick and clinical, efficient and antiseptic…No unseemly writhing, gasping or straining” ( Arizona Daily Star 1993a). As a method it “is so subtle…[like]…going to sleep” ( Baltimore Sun 1994).
Not all lethal injections have gone as smoothly as these examples indicate, however. For example, in 2009, Ohio failed to kill Romell Broom after a two-hour unsuccessful attempt by two nurses to find a useable vein through which the lethal drugs could be administered, and the execution had to be interrupted [he has still not been executed] ( Cincinnati Enquirer 2009). A few years later, in 2014, another Ohio convict, Dennis McGuire, gasped and pulled against his restraints for almost 20 minutes before finally dying ( Dayton Daily News 2014). Such examples of botched lethal injections continue to inform the continuous court-challenges to the death penalty and clearly illustrate the shifting boundaries around how much, and in what ways, the state can impose suffering on those subject to the death penalty. This is the question that the next section, on killing painlessly, confronts more directly.
Killing Painlessly
As is evident from the discussion above, the efforts by execution managers to kill efficiently and invisibly often get conflated with killing painlessly. A quick and invisible death, it is presumed, is a death with little to no pain. But as a problem, the question of pain is different and shifts the focus from the audience to the convict. It is not enough, in other words, to produce a death that is tolerable to watch. It also needs to be tolerable to endure—that is, death should come without pain. However, because there is no one to ask once the convict is dead, conclusions regarding the presence or absence of pain during executions are necessarily speculative (Kaufman-Osborn 2002). It is for this reason that the question of pain has always been entangled with the manner of which the body responds to the efforts to kill it, which it does with gasps, cries, heaves, spasms, writhes, and battles against the restraints. In the absence of such expressions, the death is presumed painless. In this way, the arrangement of executions and the accomplishment of death are intricately linked and mutually reinforcing: A death that is rendered invisible by an efficient execution arrangement is a death without pain and suffering, and a death without pain and suffering is an efficient and well-managed execution (Linders 2002).
And it is here that the hanging method was especially vulnerable. The method certainly could produce death efficiently, quickly, and presumably without pain, but it was too unreliable, just as often subjecting its victims to slow and painful strangulation as it broke their necks and produced instantaneous death. It was for this reason that electricity was such an attractive alternative. It promised a reliably quick death, devoid of unseemly features, and unaccompanied by pain to the convict. The electrician in charge of the electrical arrangements during Ohio’s first execution by electricity, which had produced death to the two convicts in a “flash” ( Cincinnati Enquirer 1897), confidently asserted that there “was no pain whatever, as you probably noticed” ( Columbus Dispatch 1897), thus confirming the assumption that the presence and absence of pain could be read on the bodies of the condemned. When the head piece was removed after the execution of Charles Tucker, in Massachusetts 1906, his facial features showed “no sign of pain or of fear or distress” ( Boston Globe 1906), again linking internal pain to external signs. Being told that “he will go to his death as quick as if he were struck by lightning and with no pain or disfigurement,” Lee Sims, who was the first person to die in Arkansas’ electric chair,” “seemed pleased” ( Arkansas Gazette 1913). Georgia’s first electrocution, according to observers, was not only quick but also “nearer humane than hanging and certainly less torturesome” ( The Augusta Chronicle 1924). Finally, in “the nation’s first portable chair execution” in Mississippi, the victim “died in about a minute without obvious pain” ( Meridian Star 1940).
With new execution technology, however, traditional understandings of the death process had to be adjusted to also include a determination of how, if at all, the killing method itself contributed to the appearance of pain. While conclusions regarding pain were still at least partially based on the visual and audible cues produced by struggling bodies, death by electricity was especially difficult to evaluate since the electrical current could produce lifelike movements in dead bodies. Furthermore, questions regarding the relationship between consciousness, an invisible state that required expertise to identify, and the death struggle added additional complexity to the determination of pain—was a struggling body always conscious? always in pain? could a still body feel pain? If such questions were difficult enough for experts to answer, they were next to impossible for lay-witnesses to make sense of. Although the crime that Frank Early expiated in the Ohio electric chair was “commonplace” enough, one witness concluded that the “awfulness of his death will live long” in the state’s “criminal annals” ( Cincinnati Post 1898). Not only did he expire “with deep groans,” but foam “spurted from his nostrils and his body strained as if it would burst the leather bands that held him to the electric chair” ( Cincinnati Post 1898). And yet, the doctors who were present asserted that this “was a startling example of the terrible gentleness of scientific execution…he never felt the shocks nor knew he groaned the groans” ( Cincinnati Post 1898). For these reasons, executions that produced death without a struggle and which left no traces of pain and suffering on the body itself remained the most unambiguous examples of successful executions.
The introduction of lethal gas as a killing agent was, similarly, couched in a narrative that linked painlessness to the manner of death. Those who watched Nevada’s first gas chamber execution, for example, “agreed that never was man put to death as painlessly” as Gee Jon was ( Nevada State Journal 1924). The warden in charge of Colorado’s first lethal gas execution was “glad [the] old gallows [was a] thing of [the] past” ( Fort Collins Coloradoan 1934a) and was certain the new method was “more humane and painless” than hangings were ( Casper Star-Tribune 1934a). Although the spectators of Wyoming’s first lethal gas execution observed various movements for eight minutes—the head convulsively thrown back, twitches, and “the sound of gas being expelled from the lungs”—the doctors insisted there was “no pain or suffering” ( The Laramie Republican-Boomerang 1937), and that movements like these were “simply muscular reactions” ( Wyoming State Tribune 1937b) or “nerve-reactions” ( The Casper-Tribune Herald 1937). They also proclaimed that the victim was rendered unconscious within “a very few seconds” ( Wyoming State Tribune 1937b) and stopped breathing “about 30 seconds after he inhaled the first of the poisonous Cyanide gas” ( The Casper-Tribune Herald 1937).
Despite the initial insistence by execution managers and experts that deaths in the electric chair and the gas chamber were humane and painless, enough visible evidence accumulated over the decades after they were first inaugurated to challenge that insistence. Hence, the continued search for an execution method that could live up to its own promises. Lethal injection became the answer. One of the great advantages of lethal injection as a method was precisely the presumption that death would be unaccompanied by such ambiguous cues about the death process and more persuasively produce a painless death. The execution victim would literally drift into an unconscious sleep and the drugs would kill without causing pain. As a Houston anesthesiologist declared, the new method was “about as painless and easy and sure a way to go as there is” ( The Associated Press 1982).
As it turns out, however, not even this technology has escaped accusations of causing pain. As with the debates around electricity and lethal gas, the question of pain remains deeply entangled in the ways in which the body responds to the agent of death. To at least some witnesses, the fact that Charlie Brooks, the first person to die by lethal injection, “gasped and moved his stomach” was a sign that his death was not painless ( New York Times 1982b). Moreover, the drug combination that, until quite recently, produced death was designed to also make it difficult for the body to respond with movement even if it did experience pain, thus raising questions about the extent to which the method conceals rather than eliminates pain. 12
And yet, it is the tensions over successful rather than unsuccessful lethal injections that most starkly capture the dilemmas associated with the efforts to kill efficiently, invisibly, and painlessly. One of the witnesses of the first lethal injection execution in Oklahoma, of Charles Coleman in 1990, called the death “very cold” and “very antiseptic,” which made it a “very easy death” to watch ( The Daily Oklahoman 1990). And yet, the experience left the witnesses “a bit uneasy”; as one of them explained, “the one thing you couldn’t get away from was there was a human being there” ( The Daily Oklahoman 1990). Witnesses of Arizona’s first lethal injection, of John Brewer in 1993, found the execution “disturbing” even though “it was very quick” and there was “no indication (Brewer’s death) was painful” ( Arizona Daily Star 1993b). A journalist watching Aileen Wournos die by lethal injection in Florida, 2002, gave words to the vague feelings of unease that so many witnesses of lethal injections have expressed; he concluded that “watching another human being get put to death is not supposed to be easy. But this was all so smooth, so clinical, so antiseptic, that it was disturbingly easy” ( South Florida Sun-Sentinel 2002).
Conclusion
In this article, we have addressed the ongoing tension between the promises and perils of new execution technology. Problems associated with mishaps, inefficiency, slow death, and convict pain have long been central to the debate over capital punishment and, as we have shown here, have propelled innovation after innovation aimed at perfecting the technology of executions. In this regard, our findings align well with what we already know about the rationalization of executions, a process that has moved executions away from the spectacle and toward speed and efficiency (Cooper 1974; Foucault [1975] 1995). However, the most significant finding is not the extent to which new technologies make executions more efficient and reliable but instead that the long-standing problem of executions in the modern democratic state has in large part been transformed into a technological problem, as if technology could resolve the moral problems of killing.
While the language of humanitarianism (Haskell 1985) has long swirled around the debate over new execution technology, there has never been any generally agreed upon definition that once and for all can settle the question of what humanitarianism demands in terms of execution arrangements. But it is clear that the elimination of convict pain emerged in the late nineteenth century as one of its dominant expressions (Kaufman-Osborn 2002). If to prior generations physical pain and bodily destruction had been part of the very purpose of punishment (Foucault [1975] 1995; McManners 1985), for much of the American history of the death penalty pain, alongside a mutilated body, has been viewed as unfortunate but uncontrollable consequences of the killing process (Banner 2002). But as the pressures mounted for new technologies of death, convict pain was redefined as a preventable foul-up. This means that convict pain became a managerial and technical problem, something to be prevented with appropriate technical interventions.
Because pain is a private experience, however, it has long been a contested aspect of executions. At the center of the question of pain has always been the visible and audible cues that bodies give off as they are being killed. It is for this reason, as we have shown, that the twin concerns for efficiency and painlessness have found their joint expression in execution arrangements that prioritize the elimination of signs that make visible the violence of killing that, to many observers, also signal convict pain. The more invisible a death is, in other words, the greater is its distance from both the crimes the penalty is designed to avenge and the brutality and inefficiency that characterized executions of yore. Hence, the attractiveness of execution methods that can produce death without bodily violence and without any obvious signs of pain. Executions thus managed, as we have emphasized, are “almost like not killing at all” (Keating 1888:236), even if death is the intended and unavoidable conclusion of an execution.
And yet, improved efficiency, the curtailment of a visible death struggle, and the reduction of pain have not quieted the debate over the technology of killing. This is so, we have argued, because the problems that technology has been recruited to alleviate, if not altogether solve, are not technological in origin. Rather, they are moral problems that are deeply entangled in the rights and responsibilities of the modern, democratic state and involve how, and under what circumstances, the state can kill one of its own citizens. With the refinement of execution technology, the moral questions around killing have become subsumed under the technological questions of how to best arrange and accomplish the killings. It is for this reason that so-called bungled executions have come to represent not simply technological failures but also failures of the state to meet its moral obligations as a just authority that does not unleash its power on individual citizens in a manner that causes undue pain and suffering.
Staging executions is morally fraught not simply because of the value we place on human life but also because of the difficulties of, on the one hand, cleansing the death penalty of its brutal and oppressive past and, on the other hand, clearly distinguishing it from the lawless killings it is designed to avenge. We have argued that these dilemmas are by now so intertwined with the manner of death that it is the workings of technology, not in/justice, that determine whether an execution is a tolerable act of state power or an intolerable “scene of subjection” (Hartman 1997). And yet, as we have also shown, once the most objectionable features of executions have been muted (albeit far from eliminated) with more efficient technology, the moral dilemmas associated with the killing itself can no longer be ignored. In fact, the findings suggest that the moral dilemma is not simply more clearly revealed once the violence of executions have been subdued by more efficient execution methods, but also exacerbated by the elements of rationality that have hade execution arrangements factory like ( San Francisco Examiner 1938a), as Bauman (1989) has argued in relation to one of the biggest crimes of the twentieth century, the holocaust. While the promise of a humanitarian execution worthy of a modern democratic state has inspired the development of execution technology that can kill efficiently, invisibly, and painlessly, those very same features have also become one of the death penalty’s greatest moral perils. It has become too easy both to kill and to watch someone die.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article: This study received funding from the Taft Research Center at the University of Cincinnati.