Corinna Barrett Lain: Secrets of the Killing State

Author and Professor of Law Corinna Barrett Lain discusses her book about lethal injection, in conversation with David Duncan.

ABOUT THE BOOK

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, Pr*son 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.

ABOUT THE AUTHORCorinna Barrett Lain is the S. D. Roberts & Sandra Moore Professor of Law at the University of Richmond School of Law and the author of (NYU Press, 2025). She is one of the nation’s leading authorities on the death penalty and one of the leading voices on criminal justice in Virginia more broadly. Lain is a former prosecutor, former sergeant in the Army, an elected member of the American Law Institute, and a recipient of the University of Richmond’s Distinguished Educator Award.

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