12:01 The Death Penalty in Context: Author Corinna Barrett Lain on the ​“Untold Story” of Lethal Injection

Anne Holsinger 00:00

Hello, and welcome to 12:01: The Death Penalty in Context. I’m Anne Holsinger, Managing Director of the Death Penalty Information Center. Our guest today is Corinna Barrett Lain, the S.D. Roberts & Sandra Moore Professor of Law at University of Richmond School of Law. She is also the author of Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection, which examines the gap between public perception and the documented reality of lethal injection executions. Her research challenges common assumptions about lethal injection: that it is painless, medically supervised, carefully regulated, and humane. Drawing on evidence that states have largely withheld from public view, Ms. Lain’s book suggests these widely held beliefs may not align with actual practices. Thank you for joining us, Ms. Lain. 

Corinna Barrett Lain 00:50

Oh, I’m so happy to be here. Thanks for having me, Anne. 

Anne Holsinger 00:53

To start us off, could you please briefly tell our listeners about your background and how your interest in death penalty research came about? 

Corinna Barrett Lain 01:00

Sure. I’m a legal historian. I first was introduced to death penalty research while doing a legal history piece on Furman vs. Georgia, which was the 1972 decision where the Supreme Court, struck down the death penalty, and then brought it back in 1976. So, yeah, my first taste of, the death penalty research was a legal history piece that really wasn’t about the death penalty at all. It was about Supreme Court decision making, but after that, you start looking at the death penalty, and it’s really, really hard to look away. So, I remember an early moment when there was an allegation from a death row prisoner that his attorney had fallen asleep at trial. It was in Texas, and I looked at that case, and the attorney wasn’t denying that he fell asleep. And I mean, I’m a former prosecutor. I found that just astounding, and even more astounding was that what the court said, which was the constitution says you’re entitled to an attorney—it doesn’t say he has to be awake. And from that moment, I was hooked. 

Anne Holsinger 02:20

As I mentioned in the introduction, your book challenges a lot of common assumptions about lethal injection. Could you give us a general overview of what most people believe versus what your research uncovered? 

Corinna Barrett Lain 02:34

Sure. I think most people think of lethal injection—I mean, I certainly did—as some sort of human form of putting down our beloved pets. Lethal injection is just nothing like that, and there’s a lot of baked-in assumptions that come with that. So, for example, I assumed, and I think most people assume, that there’s science behind lethal injection, at least veterinary science. And, you know, surely someone didn’t just make this up off the top of their head, But, alas, I document how someone actually made it up off the top of his head. He was later asked, you know, how did you come up with a three-drug protocol? And he said, I didn’t do any research, I just thought what might work. You wanted two drugs so that if one didn’t kill him, the other would. And so why not two? And then the interviewer asked him, why did you add a third drug? And he said, why not? I didn’t do any research. Why does it matter why I chose it? So, I think, you know, the science, I think there’s an assumption that medical professionals are doing this, but, actually, the people pushing the syringes, at least everyone we know, they’re nonmedical prison guards that are doing it from another room. I think there’s surprises about the drugs. I think there’s surprises about this being sort of a simple procedure. Three drug protocol, three syringes. One, two, three. How hard could this be? But, no, there’s 12 to 15 syringes. I think people think you see what you get, and that when someone, it looks like they’re drifting off to sleep, that that’s what’s actually happening, and it’s not. So, I think there’s misplaced assumptions, and through no fault of our own, but I think that there are a number of assumptions that the public views lethal injection as having. I certainly did. None of those turned out to be true. 

Anne Holsinger 04:45

You touched a little bit on the lack of medical training from the people who are, performing executions and in Secrets of the Killing State, you discussed the difficulty of accessing veins in an execution context despite the fact that that’s a routine procedure in a medical setting. What factors make this so challenging during executions? 

Corinna Barrett Lain 05:06

I’m so glad you asked this question because it really is one of the things that we see judges and policymakers and, other observers, even medical observers, saying, oh come on. Don’t tell me there was a hard time getting into the veins. This is easy. We do this all the time. Well, not in the lethal injection setting, and what’s interesting is that even as early as 1997, so over 25 ago, there was a Florida commission that was tasked with examining lethal injection, and one of the main takeaways from that report was difficulty locating and accessing a viable vein. So, this is a long-standing problem. Some of it goes to the stress just the inherent stress of the situation, and so I give examples of that in the book because these IV team members are under tremendous pressure to get it right. People are watching figuratively and literally. Some of it has to do with the inherent stress of the moment and the physiological consequences of that. So, I learned about something called vasoconstriction, which is what happens when people get nervous, when they’re stressed out, which, you know, when you’re about to be executed, that’s very stressful. It can, its constriction of blood vessels, which makes finding a vein and accessing it even, you know, more difficult, but there are larger problems that even go beyond that. I think the main reason is that condemned prisoners are, tend to be former IV drug users. They tend to have very poor general health from years of hard living, giving them notoriously weak and compromised veins. And then in addition to that, the population of death row is aging, and that actually makes their veins more frail, a condition that has been referred to as in the medical literature as age related degeneration of connective tissues. So, there’s a number of reasons that make it difficult for executioners to access, to find and access a vein that are inherent in the lethal injection enterprise itself. 

Anne Holsinger 07:45

Moving to the drugs that are used, medical experts have likened the prisoners’ experience of the specific drugs used in executions to “drowning from within.” Could you explain what causes the sensation and why this reality remains hidden from the public? 

Corinna Barrett Lain 08:04

So, it has a lot to do with the body’s pH. The human body’s pH runs somewhere between 7.35 and 7.45. Well, the drugs that lethal injection uses, these manufactured drugs, are either highly alkaline, that’s barbiturates like sodium thiopental and pentobarbital, and, and their pH runs between a 10 and 11. Or some states are using benzodiazepines like midazolam, and that’s highly acidic, so its pH is between a 2.5 and a 3.5. In any event, all of these drugs have a pH that is substantially different than the body’s pH, and normally that’s not at all a problem because the body does a very good job of buffering the pH so that the body can process these drugs. However, the amounts that are used in lethal injection are not normal amounts. They are not the amounts used in the therapeutic setting, and so it takes the body longer. I mean, normally, it would take the body just seconds to buffer those drugs. It’s a circulation or two, but with this massive amount, it takes the body longer, and what’s happening is that when the drugs are injected, they move from the vein to the heart, and the next place they go is the lungs. Well, you know, they’re getting to the lungs before the body has fully buffered that massive overdose of drugs. And so, what’s happening is the drugs are chemically burning the little capillaries in the lungs. That makes the lungs leaky, those, those capillaries leaky, and allows fluid to seep into the lungs. This causes a condition called acute pulmonary edema. Pulmonary edema is just when fluid is seeping into the lungs, and my understanding is that it’s not entirely uncommon. But acute pulmonary edema is when pulmonary edema happens in seconds and minutes rather than days and weeks, or even months as is normally the case. So, this is an acute seeping of fluid into the lungs, and that is causing people to essentially drown on their own fluids. As some medical experts have stated, and a federal court has found, you know, this is the sensation that we associate with waterboarding. They can’t catch their breath or getting water into their lungs very, very quickly, and they’re drowning on their own fluids. 

Anne Holsinger 11:03

And this is a phenomenon that wasn’t really known to the public until fairly recently. How did it come to be publicly known? 

Corinna Barrett Lain 11:10

Well, there have been several studies. The one that I would say is most well-known is an NPR study from 2020 of over two hundred execution autopsies by lethal injection. That was reported by NPR, and that study, which looked at all different kinds of the protocols, found that in 84% percent of those autopsies showed acute pulmonary edema. So, you know, it doesn’t happen every time, but 84% is a very high number. Sure, or very likely is what I would say, and that is the Supreme Court standard in Glossip. Even then, I don’t know that the public really knows a whole lot about lethal injection causing acute pulmonary edema. I think in many circles, the public still thinks that lethal injection is just drifting off to forever sleep. And in fact, I would say that we’re seeing more and more information coming through litigation files and litigation over acute pulmonary edema. There, the government’s responses have started with something as simple and clearly erroneous as, oh, you don’t have to worry about acute pulmonary edema because the prisoner is already dead when it sets in. Well, that’s physically impossible, because the acute pulmonary edema shows up as foam in the lungs, and that’s a mixture of fluid and air, which you can only get if you’ve cut air passing through your lungs. So that was quickly discarded, and then the states have had other responses that don’t make a whole lot of sense. So, you know, I think this is all still playing out in the courts and more in the courts than in the court of public opinion.

Anne Holsinger 13:17

Many states have formal statutes that shield certain execution practices from public scrutiny. Could you tell us a little bit about the other ways that states utilize secrecy around the lethal injection process? 

Corinna Barrett Lain 13:33

So, I talk about this in the book, and what I call it is the state secrecy two-step. Step one is doing everything possible to cover up botched executions and other embarrassing fines and then step two of the state secrecy two step is doing everything possible to ensure that there are no embarrassing finds in the future. So, we could think of secrecy statutes as step two in this dance around the facts, because secrecy statutes prevent people from finding out the information in the first place. But the first step of that, doing everything you can to cover embarrassing finds, the states do that in various ways. So, one way, for example, is they lower the blinds when something goes wrong. We’ve seen this again and again and again, but one example that I think about is Nebraska. Some people ask, well, have the state used fentanyl? And I always answer, one state has, and it’s never been done again, and the state was Nebraska. So, Nebraska conducted this execution, the prisoner started to turn purple, and numerous media witnesses saw this and documented this, and the prison official who was in the room said something into a mic or something, and the curtains came down. Fourteen minutes later, the curtain came back up and the prisoner’s dead. And the state had nothing to say, no explanation for any of it. But they caught a lot of heat for that. And so, a prison spokesperson shortly thereafter did issue a statement, and the statement was we didn’t lower the blinds because this person was turning purple. You know, maybe they were. Maybe they weren’t. Maybe it was purplish, but we didn’t lower the blinds because of that. We planned on lowering the blinds at that particular time all along, and that’s the explanation. And so, you know, after I talk about this vignette in the book, I quote a media witness who said, “that is just inherently unbelievable.” The entire reason you have execution witnesses is to witness the execution. And he said, so, no, we don’t believe that, and the reason we don’t is because we all have functioning brains. But to your point, Anne, what happened in those fourteen minutes? We still don’t know. I have, I have looked. I have tried. I have no idea what happened in those fourteen minutes. The state isn’t saying we don’t know. And so here is the state at its most powerful moment, intentionally taking the life of one of its own citizens, eating its own, the state eating its own, and we’d have no idea what happened. So, it lowers the blinds. States routinely turn off the sound after a prisoner has given their last words. You know why? Why do that? You know, it’s not like the sound is already off, and so they just left it off. No. The person gives the last statement, and then they turn off the sound. There’s no reason to turn off the sound other than you don’t want witnesses hearing what’s going on in that execution chamber. You don’t want them hearing the gasps, you don’t want them hearing, you know, these other things. We saw this in the federal government’s 2020 spree of executions. The federal government turned off the sound, and media witnesses were looking at these executions and saying, we’re hearing the person gasping, we’re seeing them seizing and the federal government came back and said, no, no. They were just snoring peacefully. And, by the way, those weren’t seizures, those were just pre-execution jitters that didn’t start until they injected the drugs. So just the fact that they were on the inside and the media was on the outside, and it made it very difficult to challenge that narrative when you weren’t inside. It’s true. You didn’t hear what the other party heard. So, there’s things like that, and then there’s the thing that made me really mad as I was writing it, and that is the gaslighting, the whitewashing of these executions. So, the media witnesses will show up, and I have vignette after vignette after vignette in the book where the media is reporting what happened, and the, some state official comes out afterwards and says, oh, no, no, no, no. None of that happened. It was all fine. There’s one example I give. This was in Florida where the prisoner is writhing on the gurney, and the media witnesses all saw it. They’re, they’re talking about it, and the prison official comes out and says, I saw a little movement, but it looked like he was just straining to see what time it was. And so I added a, I added a sentence in italics, so people knew it was for me, but it was, you know, I know I’m being executed, but I wonder what time it is. Like, come on. So, there’s all of those sorts of ways. I also talk about a situation where a team from Louisiana went to Texas to learn about lethal injection there, and they had to go to Texas because when the attorney for the Department of Corrections in Louisiana called to see if they could just get the information, the people in Texas said, we don’t talk about this on the phone. You’re gonna have to come out. When they went out there, they were asked if they were wearing any wires. So, you know, they do all of these things to make sure that there isn’t a paper trail. For example, here’s another one, Texas, you know, scientists start looking at these autopsies. Texas said, you know what? We’re not gonna conduct them anymore. We’re just not gonna do that anymore. So, they stopped. And when asked, why don’t you conduct autopsies anymore? The prison official said, well, we know how they died. So, there’s just this wide array of things. And by the way, DPIC had a great report that I certainly consulted when I was doing my research. I think it was Behind the Curtain or something like that, but it was a very, very good report on secrecy. 

Anne Holsinger 20:51

Thank you for that. Yes. We’re, we’re very proud of Behind the Curtain, although it’s a few years out of date at this point. So continuing on the theme of secrecy, though, your research touched on the trauma experienced by prison personnel who were involved in executions, and often their identities are hidden, by secrecy policies. I’m curious both how you were able to identify some of those individuals and also what you learned from them and how they have coped with their experiences.

Corinna Barrett Lain 21:20

As for how I learned about these people, I really need to do a shout out to the investigative journalists around the country who have doggedly pursued clues and unveiled many of these people’s identities. That’s hard work, and my hat goes off to them. They’ve been reporting on these issues for over a decade. It’s, it’s here. It’s there. It’s not all in one place, so you don’t really get a picture of what this looks like altogether with all the pieces in place. The other place I looked, though was in litigation files over lethal injection, and so there were various instances where I am diving down and find something from a court or an admission from a state, and so even when I didn’t know the person’s name, their actual identity, I was able to talk about them from court records. Medical team member number three was arrested three times. This other medical team member used to be a nurse but had their license revoked. This other medical team member was on active probation because they had been charged with two felonies, a felony stalking charge and a felony destruction of property and making threats to someone. How do we know that? Well, we know that because they had to get permission to leave the state to be an executioner for the federal government. I would say mainly between those two sources is how I was able to find those that I talk about individually. Now, in the book, I also talk about the state protocols and the requirements for executioners. So, for example, how do I know that the people pushing the syringes are nonmedical prison guards? Well, in any given execution, I, I don’t because it’s covered by secrecy, but we know that the protocols for the people who are actually pushing the syringes do not require any medical expertise at all. And on top of that, we have anecdotal evidence from instances where doctors are involved, and they’ll say, okay, but I don’t push the syringes. I don’t do that. That’s non-medical prison guards from another room. So, you have a number of data points. As for your second question, what have I learned from these people? That is really a, I think, terribly sad finding, because a lot of these executioners, those who have spoken about it, oftentimes, by the way, anonymously behind a veil, so we don’t know who they are, but they talk about the trauma of having to kill someone as a part of their job. And so I thought I’d just read a quote from one of them that is from the book, quote, “in an execution, one former Department of Corrections director explains, the condemned prisoner is a known human being who is totally defenseless when brought into the death chamber. Staff members know that he has been secured safely for many years before his execution and poses no threat to them.” Another says you’re working with a prisoner for ten years. You’ve interacted with them every single day. You can feel they’ve changed. All of a sudden, they flip a switch. Now it’s like, okay, we’re gonna go ahead and be killing them. There has to be an underlying effect from that without a doubt.” So over and over again, what they’re talking about is by the time you get to an execution, they have lived with these prisoners for at least a decade, but oftentimes two decades, even three or four decades. And one of the other surprising finds is that person that committed that terrible crime, they’re not there anymore. I mean, I studied executions deeply for seven years, there certainly were exceptions. There were people who went out swinging, but by and large, almost all of these people are, they’re not the same person that they were. And so, some of them come in in wheelchairs. They have to be propped up on medical pillows because they’re on oxygen and they don’t you know, the state doesn’t want them to choke to death while they’re trying to kill them. I don’t comment on it in the book, but I tell the stories. And so, I talk about how, you know, an executioner will pat someone on the shoulder and say, sorry, you know, we’re going to try to do this quickly. It’s just this really tragic scene and has really had me thinking about not only who are we executing, we are we are executing someone who killed but is not a killer. Right? That that person isn’t there. But, who are we creating when we ask someone else as part of their job to kill someone? And so, you know, they talk about, their family members talk about the difference in them. And so, you know, we’re creating this huge trauma, we’re creating killers. There is an effect on that. There’s an effect on those people. There’s an effect on their families. 

Anne Holsinger 27:27

Thank you for that. We’ve spent most of our conversation talking about lethal injection, but I wanna pivot a little bit over the last several years as pharmaceutical companies have become more reluctant to sell their products for use in lethal injection executions, departments of corrections across the country have sought alternative means and in 2024, Alabama became the first state to use nitrogen gas for execution. Louisiana became the second state to do so in March 2025. What can you tell us about nitrogen gas executions, and do you have concerns about this new method? 

Corinna Barrett Lain 28:02

I do, a whole lot of concerns. And the first execution by nitrogen gas was by Alabama, and it happened right before this book went into production. And so, I managed to work in a discussion of nitrogen gas and that first execution by nitrogen gas of Kenny Smith. And in this way, nitrogen gas feels to me like history is repeating itself. And so just as we had, you know, someone essentially making up lethal injection, making up the three-drug protocol, there’s no science behind it whatsoever—the same is true of nitrogen gas. And it turns out, so, Oklahoma was the first state to adopt the method, even though Alabama was the first state to actually use it and Oklahoma’s statute was based on a 14-page-report by three professors at a community college, none of whom had any medical know-how whatsoever. One of them talked to the press and said, well, you know, we couldn’t get any doctors to participate, just like in lethal injection. And I’m quoting her. She said, “We probably talked about it for three hours. We just did the best we could.” That report, which was 14 pages, double spaced, unpublished, not peer-reviewed, had so many, you know, typing errors. It was so poorly written that it actually misspelled the name of one of its principal authors on the first page. You know, once again, just as was true with lethal injection, there was virtually no discussion before the Oklahoma legislature adopted this method, and so some of the legislators talked about it and, you know, just basically said, yeah, there really wasn’t much talk. In fact, the only resistance to it were among legislators that wanted the person to feel pain. What the state of Oklahoma and then Alabama was saying on the front side of Kenny Smith’s execution was that he would take a couple sips of air, he would be out within thirty seconds, death would come within a minute or two. It would be painless, just like with divers and pilots. This was going to be a painless, quick, they’re just going to fall off to sleep, and the doctors knew. You know, the doctors right from the start said there is a huge difference between someone accidentally breathing pure nitrogen versus forcing them to breathe it when you know you’re being killed. He said, you know, have one of the doctors said, have you ever seen anyone gasping for breath? He said, it, it is terrifying, and they gasp until the end, and that is exactly what happened. Thinking about Alabama’s statements in court in its briefs saying, and I’m gonna quote one here, “the state’s method will rapidly lower the oxygen level in the mask, ensuring unconsciousness in seconds.” In all likelihood, hypoxia will cause unconsciousness in a matter of seconds, rendering the prisoner unable to feel pain. Well, that is not what happened. Kenny Smith’s execution was twenty-two minutes long. He gasped and writhed, and according to some accounts, was spitting up at least saliva as he was gasping for breath. All of them, witness accounts said he shook so violently that the gurney itself shook. And one veteran media reporter said, of all the executions I’ve seen, I’ve never seen one more violent than this. Afterwards, the state of Alabama had the audacity to say it went as planned. Alabama called the execution textbook and even said, Alabama has done it, and so now can, you can too. One thing I’ll mention in that vignette because it ties into lethal injection is that the slain victim’s son was present and was a witness in that execution. And he talked to the media, and he said that prison officials told him that it would take thirty seconds. He would be out in seconds. And he said, that’s not what happened. He came out of that execution and said, I don’t ever want to see anything like that ever again. And, you know, it turns out that even someone who is in favor of the death penalty or is in favor of an execution, would find it a grotesque experience to watch someone being tortured to death. The other thing he said was that he went back to his hotel, and the press conference was on in the lobby of the hotel and he said he just listened to it and said, only half of what they said was true. I wasn’t expecting that. Only half of what they said was true. And, you know, I have that in the book, not only because it mirrors what has happened with lethal injection, but because it says so much. You know, we expect our public officials to tell the truth, particularly when it’s the state at its most powerful moments, especially when the state is exercising the power to take life in its citizens’ name. I expect my public officials to tell me the truth and so just as this man said, when he said, only about half of it was true, I wasn’t expecting that, that was also my experience too. I wasn’t expecting that. People expect their officials to tell the truth, and in lethal injection and nitrogen gas executions, they have not done so.

Anne Holsinger 35:09

You have shared so many compelling anecdotes, but I’m wondering if during the course of your research there were any particular documents or testimonies you haven’t mentioned that really shifted your understanding of execution practices. 

Corinna Barrett Lain 35:24

Anne, thank you so much for asking that question. There is one I talked about it in the short little three-page epilogue that I think is definitely worthy of mention. I wrote a conclusion—it was a pretty good conclusion, I thought. I wrote a conclusion, and my editor said, Yeah, good conclusion. Why don’t we scrap that? And I want I want you to try to write an epilogue. And I said to her, what are you asking me for? You know, what’s the difference? What are, what, what do you what do you want? And she said, I, I want you to think about how this has changed you, how studying executions for seven years has changed you. And so, I started writing, and I end up writing about redemption on death row. And as I’m writing it, the case of Brian Dorsey, I got a news alert of an op-ed that was written by a prison guard. And the op-ed’s title was something to the effect of, we know he’s guilty. Don’t execute him. And so, I thought, that’s interesting. I’m gonna read that. And they talk about, apparently, over 70 prison guards, officials, including the two wardens, signed a petition and sent it to the governor and asked, spare this man’s life. Spare Brian Dorsey’s life. So, Dorsey had committed this murder, and the prison guard said he was guilty. This is not a case about actual innocence. It’s nothing like that. But here we are seventeen years later, and they said, Brian Dorsey lives in the honor dorm of the prison. Now, I don’t know how you get, a condemned capital murderer gets to the honor dorm, but he did. And not only that, but he was the prison barber for over a decade. And he cut the hair of not only all the other prisoners, but by choice, also the prison guards and the two wardens. So, you know, Anne just, you know, stop and think about what that looked like, a condemned capital murderer with a pair of scissors and a razor blade at the warden’s neck, time after time after time. And so, I talked about that, and then I give the next line in the op-ed, quote, “Mr. Dorsey is an excellent barber and a kind and respectful man.” And they went on to say in that op-ed, “I do not hesitate to say that executing Brian Dorsey would be a pointless cruelty. Taking Brian Dorsey’s life would be especially traumatizing for many current and former prison staff members, myself included, who have come to respect and care for this exemplary inmate.” Brian Dorsey also had a number of the family members of the slain victim saying, please don’t kill him. I think it was five of the jurors. Yeah, five of the jurors who had sentenced him to death said, don’t kill him. And Governor Parsons did not issue a reprieve, and the prison guards who had come to know and respect this man were then forced to kill him. And so, what I end up saying in that epilogue is not only about the power of the human spirit to change, but, you know, studying executions made me study who these people are at the end. You know, not who they were at their worst moment, not who they were at their crime, not who they were at trial for their crime, but who are they at the end. We tend to freeze these people in a moment of time. I myself have done so, but time does work changes and so that’s just a really big takeaway of this project. I wasn’t studying the people, I was studying lethal injection. But studying lethal injection requires you to study executions, and that required me to look at who these people were at the end. Before I saw the death penalty as a series of broken promises, of fairness, procedural protections. So, I thought of this project initially as just another broken promise to add to that list, but cases like Brian Dorsey’s and others that I studied made me see this not just as the law and broken promises, but it made me see humanity in full flower. And I cannot unsee it. 

Anne Holsinger 40:50

Is there anything else you would like to share with our listeners? 

Corinna Barrett Lain 40:54

Yeah, I, thank you for asking me that. Two things that I think about are, first, what does one say to those who say, well, they deserve it? It’s quite possible that the listeners of this podcast wouldn’t ask that question, but I bet they know somebody who would. And so, what do you say to that? And I have, you know, I have a couple things to say, but, but one of them, and the one that speaks most directly from this book, is that these conversations about the death penalty always seem to revolve around, well, does he deserve to die? And it’s really important to understand not only the capacity of the human heart and spirit to change, which I just talked about, but also whether the person deserves it in some way, in some talianic way, is only half of the equation. The other half of the equation is, did the state do what it needs to do to deserve to take that life? And the answer of this book is no. This is not a book where I make an argument and convince you I’m right. This is a book where I relentlessly document what the state is doing in our name, and I leave it to readers to see that the story of lethal injection is a story about all the ways that the state cannot be trusted with the ultimate power to take life, and all the ways that it has tried to cover that up. That’s what I would say to those who are perhaps death penalty supporters. But there’s also a message here for death penalty abolitionists because I myself wondered, why is there no book on lethal injection? I mean, Austin Sarat has a book. It’s a, it’s a shorter it’s part of the short series. It’s a great book, by the way, but by and large, there is no tome. This is the only one that says, alright, here’s all that we know. Why is that? Lethal injection has been the primary execution method for forty-five years, and there’s not a book that explores all of its pieces. I came to understand that this is not something that death penalty supporters might want to hear about, is all the ways that we’re torturing and doing all these other things, but it’s also one that abolitionists tend to shy away from. And it’s like, well, I don’t know about having a conversation about how we kill, because if I say, well, we shouldn’t be killing this way, does, doesn’t that just assume that there’s a good way to kill and a bad way to kill? And my position is there is no good way to kill, so I don’t want to talk about how we kill. I want to talk about whether we kill, and I get that, and I think that’s why there hasn’t been a book. I myself did not want to write a book on lethal injection. There’s a whole faith story behind the reason why I did. That’s on my website, CorinnaLain.com. It’s under the tab behind the book. I think it took a researcher to do this because abolitionists may not be initially drawn to this topic. But here’s the thing, as I was going through this research, I started with a question, which was why can’t states figure this out? Why are they so breathtakingly bad at a thing that we do to our beloved pets every day? Somewhere in the intervening years, my question my research question changed, and it was, why are states sticking with this? What do states get out of this? You know, they they, can’t get the drugs. They can’t get the medical professionals. They can’t get access to the veins. It’s a really delicate, error prone procedure. They’re spending oodles of money. Arizona, one point five million dollars for execution for drugs for three executions—they botched all three. Right? They’re getting sued by the pharmaceutical companies, so all of you know, and it’s not even humane. So, it’s like, why are they sticking with it? And the answer that I came to is that lethal injection does something very, very important for the killing state. Lethal injection hides the violence of state killing and makes it look like something else. I’ve come to appreciate that when, you know, for death to come before the body is ready to give it up on its own, it takes physical force to stop that heart from beating. It could be a car accident, it could be a homicide, it could be an execution, but it takes violence. It takes physical force to stop the heart, and the thing that’s special about lethal injection is it internalizes that violence, so we don’t see it. We don’t have to deal with the sight of blood. We don’t have to deal with the sickly smell of burning flesh, and that makes it out of sight, out of mind. Nothing to see here, move along. Death penalty support in this country is generally death penalty support in the abstract. Most people think about the death penalty as an idea that they agree with or disagree with. They support or they don’t support, often along tribal lines. So, death penalty support is support in the abstract. Lethal injection keeps the death penalty abstract. It is what allows the political uses to flourish while hiding the brutality that state executions necessarily entail. And that must be mighty important for the executing state because states have gone to untold lengths violating state and federal laws, falsifying prescriptions. You know, I document all of these things. It must be so important to hide what the death penalty really is. And that tells me that is exactly where abolitionists should be looking. 

Anne Holsinger 47:36

Thank you so much for joining us today, Corinna, and for sharing all these stories. If our listeners would like to learn more about Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection and about Miss Lain’s work, you can visit CorinnaLain.com. That’s corinnalain.com. And if you’d like to learn more about the death penalty, you can visit DPI’s website at deathpenaltyinfo.org. To support the 12:01 Podcast and all of DPI’s work, please visit deathpenaltyinfo.org/donate. And to make sure you never miss an episode please subscribe to 12:01 in your podcast app of choice.