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The horrors of lethal injection Wikimedia Commons

Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injectionby Corinna Barrett Lain. NYU Press, 384 pages. 2025.

Amid the second Trump administration’s unstinting implementation of full-blown authoritarianism, it might have been easy to miss that South Carolina recently executed death row prisoner Brad Sigmon by firing squad.

The set up for a firing squad is chilling in its simplicity. It involves strapping the prisoner to a metal chair, then placing a hood over their head. Under Sigmon’s chair was a basin to “catch blood.” Once he was affixed into place, three state corrections department volunteers fired at him from behind a curtain, using .308 Winchester Tap Urban bullets, “designed to break apart on impact and cause maximum damage.” They aimed at a white target with a red bullseye that had been placed over Sigmon’s heart.

The actual event was swift, the “abrupt crack” of the executors’ rifles occurring with “no warning or countdown,” according to journalist Jeffrey Collins. Sigmon’s body “flinched,” his chest rising and falling a few times prior to being pronounced dead. Collins described the spectacle as distressing even for him, someone who’d witnessed ten state executions by lethal injection and electric chair prior to Sigmon’s. “I won’t forget the crack of the rifles . . . and that target disappearing,” he reflected.

Sigmon was the first person executed by firing squad in fifteen years and only the fourth in the past fifty years. Many of the headlines led with these alarming facts, framing the execution method as anachronistic, anti-modern, and inhumane. Yet a more scrupulous interrogation of Sigmon’s death by firing squad reveals a far knottier set of insights into the politics of the death penalty in the United States. For one, Sigmon elected to be executed by firing squad, rather than lethal injection or the electric chair, fearing that the latter would “burn and cook him alive.” Why, though, would Sigmon choose to be shot in close range over the supposedly more placid, and at least one might assume, medically supervised, form of lethal injection as his preferred method of state execution?

According to legal scholar Corinna Barrett Lain’s new book Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection, Sigmon’s choice of death by firing squad reflects a sound assessment of the well-documented horrors of lethal injection. The practice originated in 1977, the year after the Supreme Court reauthorized the death penalty, when Oklahoma—raring to restart state killings—sought a method other than the electric chair, which had fallen into disrepute due to its conspicuous cruelty. The state began exploring the possibility of death by lethal injection instead. Most of the doctors approached “wanted nothing to do with it,” writes Barrett Lain. But Oklahoma’s medical examiner, Dr. Jay Chapman, was eager to help. He developed a three-drug combination that the state quickly adopted, and which soon became the model for other states.

The three-drug protocol reigned supreme for the first thirty years of lethal injection’s history. But as Barrett Lain details, Chapman’s concoction relied on zero actual research and was never subjected to a “shred of scientific scrutiny.” Though frequently justified as the humane alternative to more viscerally violent forms of execution like electrocution or hanging, a closer look at lethal injection reveals it as a continuation of state-sanctioned brutality with better PR. Far from the “kinder, gentler” method of execution the state proclaims it to be, lethal injection, which is used in nearly 98 percent of all executions in the United States, produces “more torturous deaths than any other execution method in our nation’s history.”

Barrett Lain’s book recounts its sordid history in order to make, at the very end, an argument for death penalty abolition. But her predominantly procedural analysis, which focuses on the lethal injection’s scientific, legal, and administrative deficiencies, ultimately sanitizes the racialized violence of death penalty practice in the United States. Secrets of the Killing Stateproblematizes one manner of killing while leaving the foundational practice of state murder itself mostly unprobed. As a result, the book ironically leaves openings for those who wish to salvage capital punishment rather than eliminate it.

Brad Sigmon had actually been open to death by lethal injection. But he “wanted assurances that these drugs were not expired, or diluted, or spoiled.” Such a request, Barrett Lain’s book makes clear, is entirely reasonable. Despite its regular use as an execution method and prominent reputation as a more enlightened method of killing, examples of bungled lethal injection executions are unending, leaving a macabre trail of state brutality visible only to the few paying attention. The autopsies of two individuals recently executed via lethal injection in South Carolina reveal that, due to incorrect dosage amounts, they likely died in excruciating pain. One of them, Marion Bowman Jr., executed in January 2025, was found to have had “blood and fluid” in his lungs, meaning he was tortured in the last few minutes of his life by a pulmonary edema, an experience akin to drowning. One court has suggested this execution method amounts to “waterboarding people to death.”

But it’s not just that lethal injection executions are, in Barrett Lain’s inelegant phrasing, a “hot mess.” States also go out of their way to cover them up, sometimes by passing “secrecy statutes” that state judicial systems overwhelmingly uphold. In Sigmon’s case, South Carolina’s “shield law,” a common form of secrecy statute, allows the state to withhold the details of their execution procedures from the public. This makes procuring more specific information about South Carolina’s past lethal injection executions and the current status of their drugs and process nearly impossible. Barred from certainty about whether the state’s drugs would subject him to the “prolonged, torturous death that he fear[ed] his friends endured,” Sigmon rationally—if gruesomely—“chose the firing squad.”

Secrets of the Killing State goes into great detail about the myriad procedural flaws that might make being shot to death preferable to execution by lethal injection. For one, states use credentially suspect “experts” to determine their drug cocktails. Jay Chapman’s three-drug combination of sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide, and potassium chloride was quite literally made up, yet it has been adopted by every death penalty state. Studies done in the early 2000s—decades after these drugs had been regularly used in lethal injections—suggested that prisoners subjected to the three-drug protocol had died writhing in pain. The first drug, sodium thiopental, is a barbiturate that induces anesthesia. But due to gross state negligence, correctional officials routinely underdosed prisoners, suggesting that many suffered the full and painful effects of the other two drugs. This is especially heinous given that the third drug, potassium chloride, triggers cardiac arrest and acts to “chemically burn the veins as it makes its way to the heart.” The second drug in the combination, pancuronium bromide, inhibits the prisoner’s ability to breathe and renders their body inert, causing the individual to gasp for air without being able to signal their torment. “They were slowly suffocating prisoners to death, and [states] didn’t have a clue,” Barrett Lain writes.

Knowledge of these facts did not halt states from using the protocol, nor did it prevent them from recklessly trying out new and dangerous drug combinations on prisoners. In the 2010s, some states tried a two-drug protocol, using a drug called midazolam and the opioid hydromorphone, despite having no sense of how the drugs would interact. The result was a series of mangled executions that very clearly produced protracted suffering for prisoners. The guinea pig for this two-drug protocol, Ohio state prisoner Dennis McGuire, had tried to challenge its use in court, given the lack of scientific insight into its effects. He lost the case and, in 2014, suffered a ghastly twenty-six-minute death—the longest in Ohio’s history.

The following year, horrified Oklahoma prisoners sued to stop the use of the drugs, resulting in the 2015 Supreme Court case Glossip v. Gross. Once again, the courts bent to the will of the killing state. Barrett Lain explains that although the case revealed “how bad the state’s science actually was,” the Court ultimately ruled in favor of the state, judging that it was “the prisoners’burden to show that midazolam wouldn’t work.” Though the prisoner plaintiffs had shown ample scientific evidence of the drug’s harms, the Court found they had not sufficiently shown “probative evidence” that the 500-milligram dose of midazolam given to the recipients of lethal injection did not render them insensate and in fact caused immense pain. Left unsaid is the practical fact that to procure this airtight evidence, prisoner plaintiffs would have had to subject themselves to lethal torture.

Glossip v. Gross also hindered further litigation over lethal injection drugs by creating, as Justice Sonya Sotomayor put it in her dissent, a “wholly unprecedented obligation” on prisoners to “identify an available means for his or her own execution.” Besides the callous absurdity of asking prisoners to find another way for the state to kill them, in practice, this “novel requirement” makes it impossible for death row prisoners to prove the midazolam’s unconstitutionality, leaving them—in Sotomayor’s words—“exposed to what may well be the chemical equivalent of being burned at the stake.”

Drug protocols are just one piece of the ghoulish puzzle. Because big pharmaceutical companies tend to oppose the use of their products for execution, states frequently turn to questionable suppliers. Barrett Lain describes one such entity, a “storefront for a con man who takes other companies’ drugs and sells them as his own,” who successfully sold lethal injection drugs to numerous states. More typically, states rely on “compounding pharmacies,” or pharmacies that make customized versions of FDA-approved drugs in a kind of regulatory gray area that can result in a poor quality, improperly manufactured product. One such institution, called Apothecary Shoppe in Tulsa Oklahoma, was supplying lethal injection drugs to Missouri, Georgia, and Louisiana without a license to do so, violating state and federal laws. Only through a prisoner lawsuit was it revealed that the pharmacy had committed 1,892 regulatory violations. Other compounding pharmacies have been found to be selling drugs containing bacteria, forging quality control documents, and failing to meet standard cleanliness requirements.

Flagrant errors in the actual administration of lethal injection procedures also abound. Though the act of injecting the lethal drugs requires “precision and attention to detail,” the procedure is frequently performed by completely untrained correctional guards. Based on lethal injection’s resemblance to genocidal medical procedures performed by Nazi doctors—a point that deserves more than the passing, dismissive mention it’s given by Barrett Lain—a majority of doctors and professional medical associations find lethal injections to be violations of medical ethics and refuse to get involved. Amateur executioners thus carry out the state’s death work, often struggling to find veins or failing to discern when they’ve missed one, which leads to botched and agonizing executions.

Barrett Lain’s analysis of lethal injection’s “uglier truth” is extensive, and her research certainly may be useful for anti-death penalty activists and legal professionals. But the bulk of her project suffers from a false and credulous presumption—whether Barrett Lain intends this or not—that death penalty administration in the United States, and the criminal punishment system more broadly, is or could be a legitimate enterprise, if only it weren’t being inhumanely and unjustly administered.

Secrets of the Killing Statemaintains that “lethal injection not working well is how lethal injection works,” and Barrett Lain also articulates, in the book’s epilogue, a personal opposition to the business of state killing itself; recounting the story of a man executed despite protestation from correctional officers, she writes, “The only way to prevent such senseless acts of cruelty is to retire the machine altogether.” But these moments of denunciation pale in comparison to the text’s predominantly reformist approach to capital punishment and the U.S. criminal legal system more broadly. Her decision to focus her account primarily on “howwe kill, not whether we should be doing so in the first place” explicitly articulates a desire to decouple her research from any political and moral context. No matter her personal beliefs, this approach leaves room for the interpretation that state extermination is acceptable or unproblematic so long as it is ethically meted out and made more transparent to the public. Barrett Lain’s focus on what political scientist Naomi Murakawa calls the “administrative quality” of lethal injection ultimately leaves the actual scandal of death penalty untouched and perversely sustains its lawfulness.

Take, for example, her discussion of lethal injection as an “exceedingly delicate” and “exceedingly error prone” procedure. She details at length the countless “mistakes” commonly made by the untrained correctional staff responsible for administering lethal injections, mistakes that, it should be repeatedly emphasized, result in severe, unfathomable pain for the individuals subjected to death by lethal injection. In such a construct, the problem with lethal injection is not its substantive administration of death but the poor training of those administering it. The implication that lethal injection is technically perfectible is ripe for exploitation by the killing state, creating a pathway for the death penalty to, through reform, continue apace.

Barrett Lain’s focus on lethal injection’s scientific legitimacy, legal scaffolding, and technical administration also occludes the fact that death penalty states execute a disproportionate number of people of color (over one hundred of whom have been exonerated after their deaths). The statistics on death penalty and race are egregious, making clear the institution’s operation as an afterlife of slavery and Jim Crow. Despite representing 31 percent of the U.S. population, black and Hispanic people make up 53 percent of death row inmates, with black defendants making up the majority of this percentage at 41.9 percent. Black defendants are more than four times more likely to be sentenced to death than similarly situated non-black defendants. Recently, a study examining data from 1989 through 2017 found that “racial resentment” with “deepseated historical roots, including lynching” strongly correlates with support for capital punishment and death penalty sentencing for black defendants. 

Barret Lain’s text not only ignores the death penalty and the criminal punishment system writ large’s well-documented operation as a form of racialized state violence. She even asserts in a footnote that, while “the status of those who receive the death penalty” is “an important part of the death penalty story,” it is “just not the part of the story that I tell.” This is a stunning admission. Excluding this context is not only politically reprehensible but contrary to her own stated abolitionist goals. She is far from alone in this: Barrett Lain’s fundamentally avoidant, reformist posture has long characterized U.S. death penalty politics. As scholars of the death penalty have detailed at length, the plaintiffs in 1972 Furman v. Georgia Supreme Court death penalty case, represented by the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, initially aimed to show that capital punishment was unconstitutional due to its racially discriminatory application. The Court’s historic decision did make the death penalty as then practiced void by finding that it was unconstitutional for juries to have the arbitrary power to hand out death penalty sentences. But the decision was not premised on its racist effects, nor did it unconditionally invalidate the death penalty itself.

Despite its evasive ruling, some hoped that the decision would lead to the demise of capital punishment in the United States. Yet the Court’s focus on “administrative discretion” as Murakawa writes, allowed for states to create procedural safeguards against the “capricious” imposition of death penalty that the Court found discriminatory, like separating the trials for guilt and sentencing and implementing special forms of appellate review. A subsequent Supreme Court decision in Gregg v. Georgiaconcluded that states who used guided discretion to determine death penalty sentences were constitutional.

The Court’s focus on administrative quality paved the way for the death penalty’s post-Furman revival. But it also helped justify an increasingly conservative Supreme Court’s rejection of damning evidence that these sentences disproportionately targeted black defendants. In the infamous McCleskey v. Kemp decision from 1987, which has been referred to since as the “Dred Scott decision of our time,” the Court denied that statistical evidence of racism against black death penalty defendants in Georgia constituted unlawful discrimination. It set a precedent that patterns of racial discrimination and violence are lawful so long as they were not consciously or deliberately intended.

Beyond strengthening the death penalty, the McCleskey v. Kemp decision represented a major blow to the civil rights movement as a whole. Crucially, the majority opinion in McCleskey relied on the precedents set in Gregg that suggested that the death penalty was “controlled by clear and objective standards, so as to produce nondiscriminatory application.” Thus, Justice Byron White wrote, “we would demand exceptionally clear proof before we would infer that the discretion has been abused.” The Justices reasoned that the study the plaintiffs used to show racial discrimination in Georgia’s death penalty application was “clearly insufficient to support an inference that any of the decision makers in McCleskey’s case acted with discriminatory purpose.” This decision facilitated both the legalized continuation of state murder and helped severely narrow the horizons for outlawing racism in the United States. By emphasizing the technical and legal deficiencies of lethal injection and outright ignoring its existence within a wider arena of racial fascism, Barrett Lain’s book regrettably echoes these same logical contortions.

The scandal of lethal injections is not simply that they are regularly botched or rest on shaky foundations; it’s that the death penalty and the U.S. carceral state more broadly is an apparatus that authorizes and enshrines anti-black violence in an ostensibly post-civil rights age. Particularly when support for death penalty among Americans is at historic lows, Barrett Lain’s text feels, at best, like a missed opportunity. To be sure, it is critical to disentangle the specific forces and institutions that produce common forms of state violence, which her analysis suitably provides. But if doing so mystifies the very structure and politics that produce that violence, it threatens to occlude more than it clarifies—and keeps the U.S. racial state’s abhorrent killing apparatus churning apace.