Gruesome Spectacles Revisited: News Coverage of Botched Lethal Injections Since 2010

This research is a continuation of the work done by one of the authors (Austin Sarat) in Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty. That book examined newspaper coverage of botched executions, from hangings, the electric chair, and the gas chamber firing to the early usage of lethal injection. It covered the period 1890 to 2010 and paid particular attention to changes in newspapers’ reporting of botched executions. It argued that the treatment of botched executions as “mishaps” rather than injustices blunted botched executions’ impact on the death penalty abolitionist movement. In this paper, we discuss newspaper coverage of botched lethal injections since 2010, looking closely at nine such executions identified by the Death Penalty Information Center website. Recent news reporting has mainly confirmed Sarat’s findings. However, a new component of the coverage of botched executions— interviews with the victims’ families— further dampens the impact of botched executions on support for the abolition of the death penalty.

The Meaning of Suffering or the Meaning of Life Despite Suffering

Even in patients suffering from severe physical diseases such as cancer, the request for euthanasia is often motivated by mental reasons: they consider that their life no longer has meaning, are afraid of future suffering or to be a burden for their family and are discouraged because they have to abandon some activities. Therefore, the request for euthanasia more often emerges in isolated or depressed cancer patients. On the other hand, physical suffering can often be controlled with medication, and if refractory, with palliative sedation.Should a lethal injection be the solution that we offer to the emotional despair of cancer patients? What other solutions can be offered? Where can we find the necessary resources to respond to mental and existential suffering? The theories of Viktor Frankl seem to be a good starting point since this psychiatrist devoted his entire career to empirical research on the meaning of life. Frankl’s logotherapy was developed in part in peculiar circumstances of severe suffering: during his deportation to Auschwitz. Frankl’s theories as well as his personal experience show us in an empirical way how mankind can find the meaning of life despite, or sometimes as a consequence of situations of severe suffering.

HUMANITY IN THE ENFORCEMENT OF ANTI-CORRUPTION LAWS

The justice of the law in the context of the law always subjected to refraction meaning. The justice of law can’t be interpreted as specific but can be shown through deeds. The justice of the law which is considered better by most people not necessarily also have the same feeling with the justice of the law. There are various dimensions to distinguish it. In the context of the state, the leader is the main pedestal of enforcing the law on the laws and regulations in there. When the leader of a country is it where it as full support to the state institutions that overcome the problems of corruption, namely the Corruption Eradication Commission and the whole thing can run optimally. Advice taken, namely by forming laws and regulations based on humanity with other humans, namely the variation of the judgment. The judgment referred to is social work, exile to the island of the smallest, lethal injection and impoverishment through from the first of assets appropriately. Thus, humanity in enforcing anti-corruption laws can be run better by paying attention to the humanity of the injured party.

Examination of Decision Making and Botched Lethal Injection Executions in Texas

This research examines the influence of lethal injection drug shortages on Texas criminal justice officials’ decision to change the state’s three-drug lethal injection protocol to the use of pentobarbital as a single drug protocol, without judicial oversight. We analyze data collected under the three- and one-drug protocols from 1982 through 2020 and compare differences in the length of time the lethal injection took, and complications reported by media witnesses. Findings suggest a higher rate of botched executions under the one-drug protocol than the three-drug protocol. We discuss the role compounding pharmacies may play in our results, the impact of this work on the U.S. Supreme Court’s death penalty jurisprudence, and implications concerning the unilateral decision making by Texas state officials.

The Promises and Perils of Technological Solutions to the Troubles with Capital Punishment

In this article, we interrogate the entanglement of technology with the moral dilemmas of capital punishment in the United States. Although death is obviously front and center of capital punishment, it is often backgrounded analytically speaking, serving as a looming backdrop that rarely makes it to the center of analysis. For the purposes of this article, however, death is an important focal point precisely because it is the direct target of execution technology and also the most crucial element implicated when something goes wrong with executions. Using the introduction of new execution technology (the electric chair, the gas chamber, and lethal injection) in every state as our empirical case, we enhance our understanding of the promises and perils of new execution technology by showing how the boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable executions get redrawn with each new technology, thus undermining the prospects of a technological solution to the dilemmas with capital punishment. We argue that technology cannot fix capital punishment and that is because the problem, at its root, is not about how efficiently and painlessly we kill but instead the fact that we kill at all. And this, we conclude, is a moral, not technological, problem.