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This chapter examines recent challenges to lethal injection methods in relation to debates about the death penalty in the United States. In particular, it considers how lethal injection challenges have contributed to the reduction in the number of executions and suggests that the oft-perceived link between execution methods litigation and the potential abolition of the death penalty is a double-edged sword. While lethal injection challenges may encourage “deeper reflection” about the death penalty in general, the chapter argues that such reflection leads judges to uphold methods of execution. To prove its case, the chapter cites the Supreme Court ruling in Baze v. Rees regarding the constitutionality of Kentucky's execution protocols. Finally, it discusses some of the lessons learned from lethal injection challenges.

This chapter examines the argument that the lethal injection is not humane at all, with particular emphasis on its speed and reliability. It first considers the latest criticisms against the lethal injection and relates it to two landmarks in the history of modern executions: the guillotine and the electric chair. It then provides an overview of the lethal injection and its introduction as a method of execution and goes on to discuss how notions of speed and timing have been incorporated into attempts to make executions “appear tolerable” by providing a “reliable, precise, and painless death” for the convicted. It argues that today's criticism of he lethal injection has not diverged much from that of the capital punishment discourse in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

By the late 1970s, public opinion in the United States was swinging ever more strongly in favor of the death penalty. Although the public's appetite for gas chambers had diminished, eleven states—Arizona, California, Colorado, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico (until 1978), North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Wyoming—still clung to that method of capital punishment. But the legal battle over the constitutionality of lethal gas executions, and the rise of the new method of lethal injection, were just beginning to take hold. Henry Schwarzschild, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union Capital Punishment Project, served as one of the key national players in the anti-death penalty movement in the late 1970s. After John Spenkelink's execution, attention shifted to Jesse Walter Bishop and Jimmy Lee Gray. One by one, states had backed away from the continued use of the gas chamber, usually substituting lethal injection instead.

The last gasp of the American gas chamber came in 1999 in Florence, Arizona. Ironically, and fittingly some might think, the case involved the United States and Germany. Two brothers, Walter and Karl LaGrand, were German nationals who were both sentenced for stabbing to death a bank manager during a botched robbery. After the case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which denied review, the LaGrands filed petitions for writs of habeas corpus. Arizona law gave the condemned the right to choose between lethal injection or lethal gas as their method of execution. Both brothers chose gas in the hope that the courts would find the method unconstitutional. When this tactic failed, Karl accepted a last-minute offer of a lethal injection, and he was executed on February 24, 1999. Walter, however, said he would prefer lethal gas as a means of protesting the death penalty. Walter LaGrand turned out to be the last person to be executed by lethal gas in the twentieth century. The lethal chamber had taken its final victim.

This chapter examines the paradoxical nature of the lethal injection by focusing on the Supreme Court case Baze v. Rees, which affirmed the constitutionality of Kentucky's execution protocols. It begins with an overview of various states' experimentation with execution methods from the mid to late nineteenth century and continuing throughout much of the twentieth century. It then considers the Supreme Court's articulation of the Eighth Amendment doctrine regarding the methods of execution that were adopted as part of this experimentation and goes on to situate Baze v. Rees within the context of a long-standing quest for the perfect execution. It also discusses the alleged failure of the lethal injection to meet the imperatives of the ideal of the perfect execution and considers whether it is wise to pursue the abolition of capital punishment through legal challenges based on methods. The chapter concludes by arguing that the Supreme Court's ruling in Baze v. Rees was a setback for those seeking the abolition of the death penalty.

This chapter examines the processes of implementing capital punishment; the modes of execution — paying particular attention to the current controversy over whether lethal injection can amount to ‘cruel and unusual punishment’; public executions; whether physicians should play any part in the execution process; and the conditions and length of confinement for those sentenced to death but awaiting the outcome of appeals or clemency on death row. It concludes that whatever justifications might be put forward for capital punishment, the process of inflicting it inevitably involves collateral abuses of human rights.

This chapter discusses the history of other execution methods used in the United States in modern times besides the electric chair, including hanging, the gas chamber, firing squads, and lethal injection. Since Warren McCleskey’s execution, Georgia switched to using lethal injection as its method of execution. Just as the electric chair constituted one attempt to find a more humane method of execution, lethal injection became the predominant method of execution in the United States, following various states’ earlier use of the gallows, the firing squad, the gas chamber, and the electric chair. In recent years, though, shortages of lethal injection chemicals have led states to experiment in the way they execute prisoners.

On 16 January 2014, Ohio prisoner Dennis McGuire was put to death with an untested mixture of lethal injection drugs. According to witnesses, McGuire gasped, snorted and appeared to struggle for air for ten minutes before dying. The entire execution lasted up to twenty-six minutes – the longest since Ohio resumed executions in 1999. McGuire’s family is suing the state and the drug manufacturer Hospira for what they claim was ‘unnecessary and extreme pain and suffering during the execution process’, amounting to cruel and unusual punishment.

This chapter examines the role of science in arguments calling for the abolition of the death penalty. It discusses three important milestones of the recent abolitionist struggle in which the “cultural authority of science” has been instrumental: the “innocence revolution” brought about by DNA evidence and subsequent exonerations; the recent (but temporary) de facto moratorium on executions associated with the constitutional challenge to lethal injection protocols; and what Justice Antonin Scalia has called the “incremental abolition” of the death penalty, referring to efforts to win favorable Supreme Court judgments for categorical exemptions from the death penalty. The three court cases discussed in this chapter highlight rhetorical appeals to the authority of science along the road to abolition. The chapter also emphasizes the usefulness of science in the effort to shift public opinion against capital punishment, even as it argues that science alone is not enough to turn the abolition of death penalty to reality.

This chapter examines a case of Supreme Court-approved physician drug use: execution by lethal injection. In the United States, a recurring question has been whether particular methods of execution are consistent with the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, which states: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.” The most recent execution technique to raise this question is lethal injection. After a number of statutes authorizing lethal injection were passed, but before the country's first execution by lethal injection in 1982, lawyer William Curran and physician Ward Casscells wrote an influential article arguing that physicians should not participate in executions by lethal injection. In Baze v. Rees, the Supreme Court highlighted not only past uses of torture, but also issues of contemporary medical practice and medical ethics, but did not address the constitutionality of the death penalty itself. This chapter also discusses the complex relations between capital punishment and more humane forms of execution and concludes by analyzing Justice Harry Blackmun's concept of toxic tinkering.

This chapter examines the issue of consciousness as it relates to death and the death penalty. It argues that the Supreme Court's justification for the three-drug protocol, along with recent attempts to provide a “humane” and painless death by first rendering the condemned unconscious, circumvent the ability to determine whether the method of execution meets the criteria for avoiding cruel and unusual punishment. Because the condemned is rendered unconscious and his muscles are paralyzed, he cannot testify to his own suffering. Furthermore, medical science cannot guarantee unconsciousness, particularly in terms of “consciousness of death”. It further contends that the notion of the “good” or clean and painless death is necessary to distinguish lawful execution from unlawful murder. In other words, the state justifies the death penalty as humane by distinguishing it from the barbarity of murder.

This chapter takes up an issue that more narrowly relates to the question who should administer the use of neurointerventions if such treatment were to be put into practice. That such treatment would usually require at least some degree of involvement by personnel with medical skills is beyond doubt. However, this raises the question whether physicians should be involved in the treatment of offenders. The purpose of this chapter is to consider whether the combination of the fact that the treatment presupposes medical involvement, and the view that physicians should not be involved in such treatment, is sufficient to block the whole discussion of the morally legitimate use of neurointerventions in crime prevention. It is examined whether any of the arguments that have been advanced in the discussion of physician involvement in the use of lethal injection in relation to capital punishment manage to establish that physicians have a moral duty to abstain from criminal justice use of treatment by neurointerventions.

This book investigates the profound shift in attitudes toward capital punishment in the United States and the emergence of a new abolitionist politics. Drawing on the perspectives of distinguished scholars, including long-time experts in the field, the book explores how the death penalty will end and what factors will pave the way for abolition. In particular, it considers whether the death penalty will be replaced with life without parole. The book traces the recent history of the abolitionist movement and various perspectives on the prospects for the abolition of death penalty, along with the importance of the debate about lethal injection in that movement. It also places the debate about the abolition of capital punishment in a broader political and historical context and evaluates the pragmatic compromises that might be required to end capital punishment.

Turning to capital punishment exercised on animals, along with Thomas Edison's experimentation on animals that led to the invention of the electric chair, I develop an alternative genealogy of man's moral and legal sovereignty through animal experiments within the penal code. Exploring associations between speculation, spectacle, and the death penalty, I analyze how the animal is central to the history of capital punishment and the sovereignty it secures. If, within the history of philosophy, death and the death penalty have been considered the property of man alone, we will see that the death penalty becomes man's sole property through its exercise on animals. Crucial to the codification of law in modern Europe, the capital punishment of animals proved the scope of Roman law. Thomas Edison's use of animals in the invention of both the electric chair and the first moving images draws an uncanny relationship between spectacle, animals, and the death penalty.

I address the tense relationship between ethics and politics by looking at the case of Troy Davis, an allegedly innocent black man executed in Georgia in September 2011. I begin by analyzing the ways in which two very different thinkers, Kant and Levinas, articulate the tensions between ethics and politics. Moving through Derrida's notion of hyperbolic ethics as a justice to come, I suggest that deconstructive ethics requires that we take responsibility for finding ourselves caught between ethics and politics in the impossible place of respecting the singularity of each life while generalizing principles such that we can live together on the same planet, even if we occupy different worlds. In conclusion, I argue that in order to acknowledge and avow our own investments in violence and death penalties of all sorts, we need a psychoanalytic supplement to deconstructive ethics such that we become responsible not only for what we do or don't do, but also for our unconscious desires and fears that operate as the hidden reasons for those actions.

This chapter examines how politics overwhelms medicine and bioethics in the area of partial-birth abortion. More specifically, it considers why the Supreme Court instructs physicians how to kill near-term fetuses using the lethal injection technique to avoid potential criminal liability under the federal “partial-birth abortion” law. Previous bills to outlaw partial-birth abortions were twice passed by Congress, and twice vetoed by President Bill Clinton. To improve its chances before the Supreme Court, Congress slightly modified the definition of the prohibited procedure, and in a preface declared that it was “never medically necessary.” President George W. Bush signed the modified bill into law on November 5, 2003. Justice Anthony Kennedy believes that the new law is no longer vague because it adopts the phrase “delivers a living fetus” instead of “delivering…a living unborn child, or a substantial portion thereof”.