"What botched executions tell us about the death penalty," is the Boston Globe OpEd by Austin Sarat. He's a professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. His latest book, Gruseome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty, is published by Stanford University Press. Here's the beginning:
Earlier this month, the New Hampshire State Senate deadlocked on a vote to repeal the state’s death penalty, tying 12 to 12 and leaving the law in place. The vote, though a disappointment to opponents of capital punishment, was hardly a serious blow to the abolitionist cause. There is just one person on New Hampshire’s death row, and it has no execution chamber. No one has been put to death there since Howard Long was hanged in 1939.
But in keeping its death penalty, New Hampshire did preserve a strange distinction: It is one of three states where hanging still is a legal method of execution.
If it seems surprising, even brutal, that hanging would still be technically legal in 2014, that’s because the evolution of the death penalty in America has been so closely entwined with our belief in technological progress. As executions have evolved from one method to the next—from hanging to electrocution, from electrocution to lethal gas, from electrocution and gas to lethal injection—supporters have proclaimed the dawning of an era of more humane executions while denouncing previous methods as barbaric and unreliable. The story of execution in the United States is partly a story of technology making a final punishment less painful and cruel.
Earlier coverage of Gruesome Spectacles begins at the link.
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