Abstract
Over the past decade, death sentences and capital punishment have been in steady decline in the United States, mainly due to doubts around the justice system’s ability to both correctly identify the truly guilty and to delineate who deserves to be executed and who does not. Abolitionist arguments have centered on racial injustices within systems of punishment as well as on advancements in DNA technology that have proved some prisoners’ innocence. Surprisingly absent from most discussions of the future and potential abolition of capital punishment, however, are the times the state has gotten it wrong for a different reason: botched executions “involving unanticipated problems or delays.” Such “botched executions” comprised about 3% of all state killings in the United States from 1890 to 2010.
Austin Sarat’s Gruesome Spectacles explores why botched executions have not featured more prominently in abolitionists’ agendas or used to further anti-capital punishment goals. He takes a historical approach, examining the varying execution methods the U.S. has employed throughout the years, including hanging, electrocution, the gas chamber, and lethal injection. The various chapters of the book detail the buildup to the use of these differing technologies and survey specific cases of botched executions from 1890 to 2010. In the final chapter, Sarat argues that the American media have made a concerted effort to repair any damages that botched executions could have made to capital punishment’s reputation. The media have done this by filtering these cases and by minimizing their implications for the legitimacy of the death penalty. Sarat argues that a combination of sensationalist and recuperative narratives have allowed the public to “enjoy the scandal and then quickly forget the reality” of botched executions and what they represent (p. 157).
Sarat situates his argument within the theory that the death penalty’s purpose is to distinguish state violence from extralegal violence and set capital punishment apart from criminal acts. To do this, Sarat asserts, the state must convince the citizenry that an execution is efficient, painless, and quiet—nothing more than “the mere extinguishment of life.” The “gruesome spectacles” of botched executions crack the ritualized façade of capital punishment, turning what is usually perceived to be a highly organized and state-controlled act into something grotesque and repulsive.
Sarat argues that these horrific events have not been seized upon by death penalty opponents as obvious evidence that the line between state and criminal killing is not so sharp after all. However, reading his descriptions throughout the book, it appears to me that this might not be the case, as at least some of the events have caught the attention of death penalty abolitionists. He describes, for example, protestors marching from Florida State Prison to Atlanta to oppose the death penalty in the wake of Jesse Joseph Tafero’s 1990 botched electrocution. He also portrays the 1972 Furman v. George Supreme Court decision to temporarily halt all U.S. executions as embedded in a context of journalistic coverage tying botched executions to broader debates around capital punishment. It therefore appears that botched executions were in fact consequential for abolitionist movements and have played an important role in landmark legal decisions.
Sarat provides rich descriptions of not just the crimes and deaths but the lives of those who have suffered botched executions. These individual stories are compelling and often emotional, forcing the reader to confront the reality of capital punishment through the eyes of the condemned, and thus to also confront the responsibility we all hold when the state sentences someone to die. The case studies, however, feel at times to be disconnected from Sarat’s broader argument about abolitionists’ inability to operationalize botched executions for their aims. These case studies certainly serve Sarat’s intended purpose: to tell “the stories of people whose deaths involved something more than the ‘mere extinguishment of life’.” Nevertheless, they fail to demonstrate his claims about news reporting or even the ability of the state to present a sanitized image of execution.
Sarat’s attempts to turn attention away from the most prominent anti-capital punishment arguments is commendable. Still, I was surprised that the book neglected to address issues of race within the criminal justice system. Ten of the book’s 19 case studies involve the botched execution of a Black man. Yet, Sarat fails to point out the connection between the dehumanization of racialized groups and the public’s ability to disassociate from the pain inflicted by capital punishment and its brutality, as both are vividly demonstrated in botched executions.
Putting these shortcomings aside, Gruesome Spectacles provides readers with a deeper understanding of the various methods that the U.S. has employed for capital punishment, along with well-rounded descriptions of the media’s representations of these state killings throughout the twentieth century. Taken as an examination of how and why new technologies have been employed for execution, this book will help readers unfamiliar with the history of capital punishment conceptualize and critique its mechanisms and inherent flaws, even in those moments in which it does not appear to do justice to the abolitionist movement itself. In terms of the central argument that botched executions have not been operationalized by activists to argue against the use of capital punishment, it is difficult not to conclude that Sarat provides contradictory and insufficient evidence for this claim.