Why Lethal Injection Persists Despite Its Terrible Track Record

When legal scholar Corrina Lain started researching the death penalty in the US, she thought she knew the question in front of her: "Why are states so breathtakingly bad at lethal injection?" Those answers came quickly. In an interview with Inquest about her book Secrets of the Killing State, Lain explains the idea of lethal injection emerged in 1977 as legislators sought a method of execution that would appear more humane than the electric chair or firing squad, especially after a federal district court ruled there was a First Amendment right to televise executions. That ruling didn't stand, but Oklahoma had its state medical examiner come up with a lethal injection protocol.

By his own admission, he conducted no research and simply cobbled together a three-drug cocktail. That formula—which differs from the one-drug pentobarbital protocol used in animal euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide—was adopted wholesale by other states. Lain explains why even the states that have since switched to pentobarbital still have issues: They can't get the drug from the manufacturers and must instead "use a compounded version of the drug, which adds its own quirks and problems." But there's another layer. Due to their pledge do no harm, trained professionals aren't doling out the drugs, "which is a huge part of the story," she says.

"When someone goes in for surgery, you have a trained anesthesiologist who slowly brings them down to the appropriate level of sedation." With lethal injection, what "we have is non–medically trained prison guards who are injecting a full bolus dose of the drugs from another room through seven feet of tubing," with torturous results. The full interview is fascinating and worth a read. Lain delves into how three Supreme Court decisions have made it nearly impossible for death row inmates to successfully challenge lethal injection protocols under the Eighth Amendment. She concludes that despite mounting evidence of botched executions, states cling to lethal injection because it "hides the violence of state killing."