By Bill Littlefield

The author argues that “the only way to prevent the senseless acts of cruelty” that result from the “grinding gears” of the “machinery of death” is to “retire the machinery altogether.”

Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection by Corinna Barrett Lain. New York University Press, 355 pages, $29.95

Secrets of the Killing State is a horror story.

The author, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law, begins her book with an apparently reasonable premise. People who’ve thought at all about the process of execution by lethal injection most likely assume that those who have been condemned to death by that means are put quietly to sleep. Heck, we all know that’s how we put down dogs who have lived too long and are in a state of constant, debilitating pain. Kindly veterinarians inject the animals with some drug that painlessly induces unconsciousness. Their weeping owners stand by and say goodbye, tenderly holding their dying pet’s paws.

Convicted felons who have been executed in the many states that have adopted lethal injection have not received such a storybook humane end. Corinna Barrett Lain recounts the hideous torture endured by many of the men executed by this means. Some of the executions have gone on for hours. The men in charge of the gruesome process have often been woefully unprepared for their jobs. Men waiting to die are sometimes stabbed a dozen or more times by prison employees without medical training; the employees are trying to find a vein into which the three poisons designed to kill the men can be injected. Drugs meant to do the job have often been inappropriately mixed by people who haven’t the training necessary to do the job correctly. Sometimes the result of the incompetence has been clogged tubes or loose connections that have prevented the poisons from reaching their destination. What might be the most flagrantly bizarre instance of that sort of mishap was the execution of Joseph Cannon in Texas. Nobody entrusted with killing Mr. Cannon noticed that the catheter had popped out of his arm. When the executioners began pushing the drugs into the line Cannon himself had to point out the snafu. The executioners halted the process because Mr. Cannon had to be given a second go at “final words.” Nobody felt that those words should be “It’s come undone.”

Lain’s research has revealed all manner of other shameful practices in the business of lethal injection. In Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama, and elsewhere, prison employees with insufficient training or no training at all have mishandled drugs, in some instances failing to refrigerate them. Prison authorities have bought drugs on the black market — sometimes the wrong drugs —  because legitimate pharmaceutical companies have refused to supply those involved in the execution business. Botched executions have sometimes resulted in torture so palpable and gruesome that witnesses in a room adjacent to the execution chamber have been prevented from watching the process. Blinds had to be lowered in the window between the two spaces. As journalist Elizabeth Bruenig has written, “What observers do see looks vaguely surgical. What they don’t see looks like a war crime.”

Because Lain knows that there is more power in stories than in statistics, she has filled Secrets of the Killing State with tales of the horrors associated with individual executions by lethal injection. She begins the volume with one of the most graphic, the execution of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma in 2014. Mr. Lockett’s sensational distinction? He “woke up in the midst of his own execution and tried to get off the gurney.” The author examines the myriad failures in procedure that were necessary to bring about that macabre event. Perhaps the single most remarkable part of the narrative was the head-shaking reaction of one of the executioners, who told investigators, “We don’t know why everybody’s calling it a botched execution. It was a successful execution. He’s dead.”

That pride in success is perhaps not all that surprising. Every once in a while, an execution by lethal injection has gone so badly that it has had to be stopped in the middle of the process without getting the job done. The execution of Alva Campbell in Ohio in 2017 was so thoroughly botched that the man survived it. Eventually, he was removed from the death chamber and returned to his cell. He was suffering from lung cancer, prostate cancer, and respiratory problems at the time. He politely died before Ohio could try again to kill him.

Lain’s clear, detailed, and utterly convincing argument is that lethal injection has been a fraud from the very beginning. There are few mentions of other methods of execution in her book, and at the outset she contends that she does not wish to argue one way or the other about the legitimacy of capital punishment. But, in an afterward, she acknowledges that her research has led her to believe that “for the vast majority of prisoners (condemned to death), it was evident that the person who committed that terrible crime just wasn’t there anymore.” She argues that “the only way to prevent the senseless acts of cruelty” that result from the “grinding gears” of the “machinery of death” is to “retire the machinery altogether.” The academic has done the research to make that argument. I hope Secrets of the Killing State finds a large readership ready to embrace her powerful conclusions.

Bill Littlefield volunteers with the Emerson Prison Initiative. His most recent novel is Mercy (Black Rose Writing).