Death Penalty News

A new book argues the way states perform executions is inhumane. Sierra Pfeifer sat down with its author to learn about the 'untold story' of lethal injection and Oklahoma’s role in how the condemned are executed. Lethal injection is the most common form of execution in the United States, designed to appear sterile, swift and humane. But as University of Richmond law professor Corinna Barrett Lain reveals in her forthcoming book, Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection , that perception is far from reality.

ST. LOUIS (AP) — Missouri’s execution protocol allows for “surgery without anesthesia” if the typical process of finding a suitable vein to inject the lethal drug doesn’t work, lawyers for a death row inmate say in an appeal aimed at sparing his life. Brian Dorsey, 52, is scheduled for execution Tuesday for killing his cousin and her husband at their central Missouri home in 2006. His attorneys are seeking clemency from Gov. Mike Parson and have several appeals pending.

On December 7, 1982, Texas strapped Charles Brooks to a gurney, inserted an intravenous line into his arm, and injected a lethal dose of sodium thiopental into his veins, launching the lethal-injection era of American executions. In the precisely forty years since, U.S. states and the federal government have put 1377 prisoners to death by some version of the method. Touted as swift and painless and a more humane way to die — just as execution proponents had said nearly a century before about the electric chair — the method has proven to be anything but. Experts say lethal injection is the most botched of the execution methods, estimated to go wrong more frequently than any other method. And autopsies of more than 200 prisoners put to death by lethal injection found that, regardless of the outward appearance of a tranquil death, 84% of those executed showed evidence of pulmonary edema — a fluid build-up in the lungs that creates a feeling of suffocation or drowning that experts have l...

An independent post-mortem examination completed earlier this month confirmed that Alabama’s execution of Joe Nathan James was, as Robert Dunham, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, put it , “among the worst botches in the modern history of the U.S. death penalty.” James was executed on July 28 for the 1994 murder of Faith Hall (despite the objections of her children). In the early preparations for his death by lethal injection, the execution team had great difficulty finding a vein in which to insert the IV line. State officials kept him secluded for three hours while they repeatedly poked him with needles and subjected him to great suffering . From start to finish, James’s execution may well have been the longest in American history . He joined a disturbingly long list of people, including Clayton Lockett , Joseph Wood , Doyle Hamm , Romell Broom and John Marion Grant , whose executions by lethal injection made headlines in recent years when they went h...

Oklahoma will soon begin executing death row inmates at a pace of about 1 man per month, with plans to put to death 25 prisoners over the next 2 years despite cries by critics and experts who point not only to outstanding questions of the mental fitness or possible innocence of some but also the state’s recent history of botched lethal injections. “It’s just yet one more reckless move by Oklahoma,” Deborah Denno, a Fordham University law professor, told CNN of the state’s scheduled execution timetable, which she said is in line with its staunch, decadeslong record of capital punishment. “If there was going to be any state that was going to do something so obviously irresponsible and unjust … it would be the state of Oklahoma, given the history.” James Coddington is the 1st scheduled to be executed on August 25. He would have been followed about a month later by Richard Glossip, who has maintained his innocence and on Tuesday got a 60-day stay of execution so an appeals court can comple...

This much is undisputed: In 1994, Joe Nathan James Jr. murdered Faith Hall, a mother of two he had formerly dated; in 1999, he was sentenced to death in Jefferson County, Alabama; and he was executed on July 28, 2022. Whether James ought to have been killed was and is, by contrast, deeply disputed—Hall’s family pleaded that their mercy should spare him, and the state government acted against their wishes. Also disputed is the matter of how, exactly, the Alabama Department of Corrections took James’s life. Or it was in my mind, at least, until I saw what they had done to him, engraved in his skin. A little over a week ago, James’s body lay on a bloody shroud draped over an exam table in an Alabama morgue scarcely large enough to accommodate the three men studying the corpse. He had been dead for several days, but there was still time to discover what exactly had happened to him during the roughly three-hour period it took to—in the Department of Corrections’ telling—establish access to ...

Former Oklahoma Governor Brad Henry and former U.S. Magistrate Judge Andy Lester, who co-chaired the Oklahoma Death Penalty Review Commission in 2017, have called on state officials to halt the scheduled executions of 25 death-row prisoners. In a guest column in The Oklahoman on July 24, 2022, Gov. Henry, a Democrat, and Lester, a Republican, write that “All Oklahomans, regardless of one’s stance on capital punishment, should insist on an unwavering commitment to fairness and accuracy” in death penalty cases. Instead, they say, “the state is barreling ahead with an unprecedented number of executions despite the numerous flaws in the implementation of the death penalty.” The Oklahoma Death Penalty Review Commission was created in March 2016 during a pause in state executions in the wake of the botched 2014 and 2015 executions of Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner and the September 2015 near-execution of Richard Glossip in which the state violated its own lethal injection protocol by ob...