Secrets of the Killing State
The Untold Story of Lethal Injection
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Lethal injection is nothing like what people think. This is its untold story.
In the popular imagination, lethal injection is a slight pinch and a swift nodding off to forever-sleep. It is performed by well-qualified medical professionals. It is regulated and carefully conducted. And it usually provides a “humane” death. In reality, however, not one of those things is true.
Secrets of the Killing State pulls back the curtain on this clandestine punishment practice, presenting a view of lethal injection that states have worked hard to hide. Botched executions are a part of this story, but they are just the tip of the iceberg. For all the suffering that we see, there is also suffering that we don’t see. Indeed, the story told here is even bigger than the executions themselves, for behind the scenes is where it unfolds. Fake science, torturous drugs, inept executioners, prison problems, and decades of state secrecy have created an execution method hard-wired to go wrong in countless ways.
The story of lethal injection is a story of gross incompetence, law breaking, torturous deaths, and a stunning indifference to the way in which human beings die at the hands of the state. These are the secrets of the killing state―all that we know from litigation files, scientific studies, investigative journalism, autopsy reports, interviews, and scholarship across a number of fields. Death penalty expert Corinna Barrett Lain uses this groundbreaking journey into the dark reality of lethal injection to shine a light on the American death penalty more broadly and show that the state at its most powerful moment is also the state at its worst.
We are now over 45 years into the lethal injection era, and most Americans still have no idea what states are doing in their name. It’s time they found out.
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Utterly Horrific. The crimes of Josef Mengele (Auschwitz) and Shiro Ishii (Unit 731) during WWII will (hopefully) live on in infamy throughout human history as among the worst things governments have ever done. Sadly, even since then, humanity has shown its horrific side more times than any of us care to really think about, be it genocides in Myanmar and Rwanda, the continual sex trafficking that despite efforts has never been eradicated, the child sex scandals that have rocked so many once-trusted professions, and many, many other ways.
While none of the above should be downplayed in any way whatsoever, they *do* set the stage for the horrors of this particular tale in that we know that most of those involved in the above were the bad guys. They were monsters clothed in scrubs or robes or wearing ties. Here, the monster is... well, the government itself and the sheer ineptitude of its bureaucracies and even legislative and executive leadership - not to mention the judicial leaders that are *supposed* to alleviate some of the worst excesses of the legislative and executive branches, but as Barrett Lain shows here, rarely do when it comes to the mechanisms of putting condemned criminals to death via lethal injection in the United States.
What Barrett Lain lays bare here in this very well documented (29% of the overall text) expose are the true horrors of lethal injection - the very execution method *specifically created* to give the *illusion* (as Barrett Lain makes clear) of a "humane" murder. Except that, as noted often within this text, the particular mechanisms of how this is done in humans are actually so barbaric and horrific that they are actively outlawed for use in animals!
No matter your position on capital punishment, no matter how much you may think a particular convicted criminal (or even, as is so often the case in social media, people merely accused of various crimes and yet so many still clamor for their execution before even a criminal conviction, without any form of legal due process as guaranteed for all persons - not just citizens - in the US Constitution) "deserves" to die... you NEED to read this book.
Read this book, and consider your own conscience. Can you honestly say after reading this book that this particular method is truly reasonable in its actual application today? Can you honestly say after reading this book that you are 100% comfortable with your own loved one going through this exact process? Because as others have noted in so many other works about the other problems with the American retribution system, there are next to no actual guarantees that you or your own loved ones won't face this fate at some point, no matter how good and righteous you may feel you are - there are simply far too many laws - even laws with felony penalties! - within the US now, to the point that *no one* can truly know when they are not running afoul of at least one of them in any given moment or action. Read this book, examine your own conscience, and truly ask yourself if you could do this job or ask your best friend to do it. Read this book, examine your own conscience, and ask yourself if you could bear to allow your children to witness this process.
Read this book, examine your own conscience, and write your own review.
As SCOTUS has decreed, as documented by Barrett Lain here, that the condemned must offer an alternative to lethal injection for their challenges to have even a possibility of even being heard, let me state clearly here now that I would vastly prefer a firing squad to the inhumane and downright barbaric practice of lethal injection. As for me, while I've been an advocate of permanently ending the death penalty in favor of life without parole for many years now, even I hadn't been fully aware of just how utterly horrific this particular execution method - posed to the US public as the more "humane" option - truly is, and I for one now count as one calling for the end of this particular method even if capital punishment must be allowed to continue.
Read this book, examine your own conscience, and let the world know in your own review whether you agree with me or not.
Very much recommended.
Originally posted at bookanon.com.