Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion On Gruesome Spectacles 20140526

At 7 00 there will be an event on what would cause the songbirds in the northeast so if you are moved to go to the jones. Thanks a lot. Without it this tow town would e williamstown. [laughter] when my son was being bar mitzvah, the rabbi the first thing he said at the service was to shut off cell phones and he spoke with the authority for people of aid and then about 90 seconds into the service a cell phone rang and ive never seen a rabbi turned white quite so quickly. It was his. The first part is to give you a little bit of a sense of the surrounding of the book about what the book tries to do and then second i want to read a little bit from the book and third and most importantly, i would love if we could have some conversation about the subject. Let me tell you a little bit about the book botched executions in americas Death Penalty and i recommend it for mothers day giving. This book purports to be the treatment of the subject of botched executions in the United States and what it tries to do is examine the history over more than a 100 year period and to try to make sense of the way in which they are understood in the Popular Culture and the struggle to end the United States together with my collaborators and henry weaver, the undergraduates we studied every american execution from 1890 to 2010 and determine just over 3 of the executions were botched. Surprisingly the technologies of the 20th century to execute and here i will pause and you contemplate what they were hanging the electric chair, the gas chamber, the firing squad and lethal injection. Surprisingly among all of this technology is ththosetechnologie with the highest rate of things going wrong is lethal injection. So about 7 of injections in the United States have been botched. We are giving th argue in the by have helped propel changes from one technology to another in the course of the period hanging from electrocution and gas and gas to the lethal injection. But yet they play very little role in the overall conversation about whether or not the United States should maintain Capital Punishment. This is in part because of the law and Popular Culture is a mere accident on aberration. The rope wasnt tied tight enough. I hope that by offering a broad historical overview of the subject we can see more clearly and consider whether there is something of a broad significance about the phenomena of the executions. Perhaps part of the answer is found in the eighth amendment to the constitution of the United States which as you know prohibits cruel punishment. As the courts have interpreted the amendments prohibition of the amendment, they have argued that execution where it is used must involve no where near what they have called the extinguishment of life. Judges have said when we execute we must execute in a way that is comparable with the evil thing standards and the decency of the humane society. In each of the chapters i discussed the aspirations associated with each new technology as it has been deployed in the business of state killing and it is surprising how familiar what was said about the electric chair and then reset about the gas chamber. Each is advertised to be safe, reliable and effective. This book tells the stories about an american romance with technology. A belief in scientific progress and that belief in scientific progress plays out in the field of Capital Punishment. It also tells the story of how that belief in scientific progress was betrayed in each of those technologies. The book describes the cases in which the executions occurred telling the story of the lives of the command and focusing in particular on the crimes that they committed. Throughout, what i hope to do is to tell what i would call a balanced story not neglecting the pain and suffering that the crimes imposed on their victims all the while of course attempting to focus on the fate of those that we put to death. Its to do something i think a little bit out of step with where most of the conversation at ththat the capital punishmens coming in the United States. So perhaps the most important issue surrounding the Capital Punishment is the problem of the risk of executing the innocent. So this book attempts to balance that concern with the innocent by examining the fate of the guilty. And i think at the end of the day i hope this book contributes to a conversation about whether 3 is an acceptable error rate in the practices of Capital Punishment. Let me say a word about what just happened in oklahoma. I had the privilege of being invited to speak at a symposium a couple of weeks ago on privacy and my good friend and colleague mentioned this book which at that point was forthcoming and i assembled the audience how silly it was to write a book about the executions after a nothing would interest anyone and that to write a book that would so i should have written a book about privacy and then oklahoma happened. Dion and the headlines that is crucial in assessing what happened is the context in which it occurred. Today the Death Penalty itself seems to be in decline. States such as new jersey, new mexico, connecticut and illinois, maryland have all a polished Capital Punishment into the debate is ongoing in delaware, kansas, kentucky, nebraska, Washington State and my favorite of all, south dakota. Public support while still high is falling and in addition to number of death sentences imposed by american courts has fallen steadily over the last two decades from a high of three to 15 in 1996 to 80 in 2013. Likewise after peaking in 1999 dropped to 39 in the last year partially due to the increase popularity of life without parole and to the rash of people exonerated from americas death row, use of the Death Penalty has diminished to the point that only 15 states handed down the sentence is in 2013. So that is roughly less than half of the states that maintain the penalty that imposed the sentence in 2013. In this environment at the period of what i would Call National reconsideration of the Capital Punishment, the failure of the injection may assume greater significance. They may offer an additional reason for the American Public and politicians to question whether we should continue to use the Death Penalty. Now, finally before turning to the book itself and indulging myself in reading some of my sentences out loud, let me share with you a concern that has been shared by several of my friends, roughly the conversations go like this why what you want to write a book about botched executions . And of course i know what they were thinking. What kind of person are you that would write a book about the botched executions. Having written about divorce and White Collar Crime i will let you figure out which one i am opposed to. Ive been studying capital punish for no more than a decade and they are concerned that the book titled gruesome spectacles would itself be gruesome. Im going to do something which is a little unusual in a book presentation like this. I want to read from the first review of the book. I think it at least captures the aspiration of the book itself and may assure you that it would be an appropriate gift. So this is from the review areas one would expect a group titled the gruesome spectacles executions in americas Death Penalty to inflame the sentences and create outrage with its descriptions of executions, on the. But she does not attempt to increase the suffering. By writing about these in a way that might stir. If every book took a measured approach to the incendiary subject, it is this one and the review goes on. Each case begins with a short account followed by a long detailed narrative of the crimes that led each to his death at the end of the state. In most cases the guilt is not in doubt and the crimes are indeed horrible. Is this the structure you would adopt if your goal were to simply persuade the readers of the evil of the Death Penalty . And then the review concludes if youre hoping for an antiDeath Penalty screen, this book will disappoint you. If you are looking for a thorough accounting of the executions in the United States. This book has everything that you are looking for. That is a dream come true. So now for part number to let me read you some sentences from the gruesome spectacles. This is the way the book starts. On september 28, 1900, the state of North Carolina an hanged himr a murder in Sampson County and he was born in the county in 1865 and he lived there his entire life. Even though he weighed 110 pounds, he was said to be as tough as iron. He had an unfortunate habit carrying a few of the viewed with the neighbor. The argument began and then the fight broke out. They stabbed him to such an extent that he died during the night and they were sentenced to hang. On the surface at least there is nothing remarkable about what North Carolina wanted to do. Hanging head in th had been they method of execution in the United States since the founding of the american colonies. It wasnt an expensive. It didnt require any protocol. On the day of the hanging, hundreds of people traveled from all over the country to witness it. As in all of its executions, Sampson County used a stepladder as it downloads. But in this instance it failed to do its job. It proved insufficient to break the neck with consoles at the end of the rope the attending physician quickly determined that he was still alive. Undaunted by the failure of the first execution attempt, officials cut him down, forced him up the ladder again and repeated the drop. This time the execution succeeded and he died. His turnout was the last public hanging in Sampson County North Carolina. Newspapers all over the country took note of the execution. Headlines announced that it hadnt gone as planned. For example, the Washington Post titled its article murderer hanged twice and described what it called a ghastly gallows scene. Almost a century later in march of 1997, american newspapers carried stories of another botched execution. This time the electrocution of pedro a 39yearold cuban immigrant convicted and condemned for stabbing to death a Florida High School teacher. After the current was turned on at his execution as one newspaper put it the flames leapt from the come down and it was horrible, the witness was quoted as saying. The flame covered his whole head from one side to the other. And it left the impression of someone being burned alive. The medina execution, like the consoles execution before it made headlines because it suggested that the request for the payments effective and reliable and allegedly Humane Technology of death was by no means complete. Both remind us of the ferocity of the sovereign power over life itself, no matter what technology is used. The executions like those of medina and at last weeks execution in oklahoma have been an important part of the Capital Punishment in the United States. From the beginning the practices have been designed to differentiate the violence prone to violence outside of the law. This is especially true in the 20th century when the efforts were made to put people to death quietly, bureaucratically. The course of the last century is littered with various technologies hanging the firing squad electrocution. That means by which the state could take quite execution of the system are not supposed to make headlines. Then the near extinction of life. Painful death might be more just or more effective as a deterrent and that it is quick. The pain experienced as a part of the punishment about the constant search for the painless way of killing those who kill. Yet even as Capital Punishment seeks to justice and the desire for vengeance for state and i think the public has a countervailing concern. The state into the publi and tht distinguish an execution from the act to which it has responded. Its tied to the instrumentalities of their own execution. The legitimate the killing depends upon the method of execution itself. Technology mediates between the state by making physical pain and visible. They signal a break in the root of the Capital Punishment. The american Death Penalty examines the history of the botched executions in the United States from 1890 to 2010. The pure code approximately 3 of all executions were botched. The Standard Operating Procedure occurs. The botched executions involve unanticipated problems that cause at least arguably unnecessary agony for those that are to be put to death. Examples of such problems include among other things inmates catching fire or being electrocuted. The come down to being strangled the dream hangings instead of having their next broken into inmates being administered the wrong dosages of specific drugs that we hold injections. This book describes the problems that have plagued the Technology Used in the effort to understand how and why things go wrong during executions. It tells the story of the Death Penalty through the eyes of those whose have been botched. The book focuses on 18902010 because this was a critical period in the transformation of american Death Penalty from its more traditional to its more modern form. It was an addition a critical period and what the historian called the continued centralization and professionalization of punishment. Indies developments we are collectively invited to search for a way of taking life that signals allegedly the superiority and that marks the distinction between state violence and violence outside of the law between the Capital Punishment and thats what we call murder. So thats the end of part number two. Now i would love to entertain some questions and thoughts. One of the things i know about your work is that you have been very interested in the abolition of Capital Punishment. And im wondering if you belief that this book contributes to the effort to abolish Capital Punishment because we both know that simply exposing the spectacle of killing as you noted before in the state it doesnt necessarily lead people to conclude that that is what should happen. So im wondering how you see this fitting into your overall project as an abolitionist. Much of the work that ive done on the Death Penalty has tried to locate the Death Penalty in a set of broad, political and legal arguments. So for example ive been interested in the relationship between the Death Penalty and politics. This book really continues to interest for me. What it does is it tries to surface and make public something that was previously had been. I want to go back and answer the question of which it happened. I believe the Death Penalty is dying in the United States. And indeed, id be that by the time that my son who is now 18 is my age that the Death Penalty will be gone from the United States. But it will be a slow and uncertain one. It will have been state by state until all that is left is texas. [laughter] until all that is left is. [laughter] is a reticent crowd. So what is driving this . I think what is declining the Death Penalty is concerned about the way in which it is actually administered. So no one has ever had their mind changed about the Death Penalty. Arguments about whether it is reagans were retribution. No one has had their mind changed by an argument that the Death Penalty is incompatible with human dignity. Changing minds about the Death Penalty in the United States is the worry that we cant get it right so we talk to people in favor and assay are you in favor of the Death Penalty and they say yes and the then you say aru in favor of executing the innocent and they say no. Are you in favor of the Death Penalty . Yes. Are you in favor of executing people because of the poor quality of their lawyers . Now. So in the context in which american attention is now turned to the way in which the Death Penalty is actually administered, i think that a conversation about the executions adds to that set of concerns in the way in which ten years ago or 15 years ago it would not end of the book demonstrates that over the course of the 20th century. I think that it will pay a small parpart in the context of the rethinking of capital punishme punishment. Thank you for the description of the horrible topic. Im wondering if you found this over 100 year trajectory changing conceptions of cruelty that as you described changing technologies and the responses to those technologies has the cruelty itself remained the same and finding the struggle that reduces it more and more. They declare the technology of execution unconstitutional per se. The court has upheld the hanging and in the case the court upheld a lethal injection. The legal conception remains pretty much the same. And that is the cruelty is the unnecessary or excessive infliction of pain. So i think it will remain constant. It can be painless effect of invisible peer credit form i think that our sensibilities about violence and its display have changed a lot from the beginning when there was a kind of crusade to drive the appearance of the violence, pain and death out of the public view, and that sensibility resulted eventually in the uniteUnited States and the endif the public execution, the last public execution occurred in kentucky in 1935. And the last thing i would say is that it seems to me that the question of cruelty and how its changed me be telling in the debate about Capital Punishment it may be less telling than is the question of justice. And thats what i was trying to suggest earlier. And even people that are in favor of Capital Punishment in the abstract may be convinced to at least reconsider their position when they begin to think about not only what Capital Punishment does for us, but with Capital Punishment does to us, how Capital Punishment images Central America and legal values like equal treatment under the law and the due process of the law and the simple proposition that no human being should ever be treated in a way that is cruel. Thank you for the interesting talk. I wish i could share your optimism that the decline that we see in the state decisions about Capital Punishment is going to continue actually to take the opposite is likely. Because we are at a moment in the evolution for example of the technologies which have now become so predominant in science that we are able to go back x. Post back there and look at the dna decisions and say those were in error and thats why this problem but you even get to test faulty decisions that we are bue going to soon enter the phase where those sort of convicts have all passed away or have been freed or executed and instead enter the criminal Justice System to assure us that in fact the trial proceeded to find the right person and we will then see a rise with the comfort in using technologies to punish where i think we will see a return to dna being used to justify executions into the technology that we will again gain some comfort with bitterness after the lethal injections to continue to grow the number of executions that we are comfortable with. I think that the movement has gotten all of the mileage it could get from the war of the innocents. I think that is money in the bank. That is an argument that is already cashed out. What is driving the concerned about the Death Penalty that is their and people worry about it and the socalled csi effect you see in the trials all over the United States isnt driving the conversation. Its the question of cost in the Financial Sense and im going to see in this broad moral sense. The United States doesnt have the Death Penalty. Five states execute more than two thirds of the people that were executed. And if i see texas kind to know what im talking about. And you cant name some of the others, right clicks you can name some of the others. Florida, virginia, oklahoma and missouri. Soon in the United States the Death Penalty will be the way apartheid was in south africa. It will be increasingly concentrated here in fewer places. It may be that texas will hold on longer than i predict that even texas is changing. And by the way, if you look at the texas you see that even texas doesnt execute. If you look at a county by county map of the president ial election in the United States day when by winning very few counties. But they were in the highly populous counties. Other than new york city. It doesnt execute many people. It sends a lot of people to death row. But almost all of those sentences come from los angeles county. Arizona sentences of people to death row almost all of those sentences come from tucson. He granted one stamp of execution during his time. He did it because there was a worry that the person might be innocent and they did dna text and it came back as guilt. He was executed. So, while i think you are right it can be used to affirm guilt i think the forces that are pushing us away from the Capital Punishment are very, very strong in that we have a lot of mileage out of that one and that one isnt going to. You cant get rid of the Death Penalty without embracing imprisonment and life without parole. Thats a funny stance. Im against the Death Penalty but life imprisonment without parole. As i stated to my children, im right. [laughter] i cant see you. You mentioned your collaborators in the introduction and i wondered if you could speak about the process of writing and with that collaboration meant. Those of you that by the book or take it out of the Jones Library where we have many copies we noticed when you open up the front cover, you see my name and the name of the amherst undergraduate this couldnt have been done without them. It couldnt have been written without them as well. In the last several years providing opportunities for the students to do research in the faculties to become meaningful collaborators. Its to work with faculty into this book, the existence of this book is a testimony to the capacity of undergraduates to carry the scholarly load that in the past would have been thought to be only carried by graduate students and family members. There is a collaboration of the science is, so every article has 350 names. To collaborate within undergraduate on the resource project, it is to run a kind of risk. The research cant be very good because it was done by undergraduates. But i hope that when you read the book you will be convinced that the perception is radically wrong. Teaching the students that are in this room working with these students is the best thing that happened to me in the 40 years of teaching. I was going to save my things until the en end the pain of het it is never premature. I really want to say thanks to greg hall who has been a leading figure in transforming the college to make possible the kind of collaboration that is represented in this book without his belief in a leadership this transformation would not have happened. I wouldnt have published my 50th or 80th or 90th book. May i told you you are favorite student. [laughter] if you have a lethal injection or there is something that was developed such supposedly happens when all of us in this room have had to put an animal asleep and it is one of the most humane things you can do. Its done with a horse after a e raised it to them if they are a milliondollar horse. Horse. If the process were to develop to the point that there was a reasonable assurance that that which is on animals which is also going to be successful used so that it could be taken out, what would your feeling about Capital Punishment to be and would it change at all . What i said earlier hasnt been made about every technology about the execution. From the point of view of the promise is the electrocution. The time the electrocution was introducethat electrocution wase of new york first. Electricity is a Promising Technology today. And there was a competition in new york between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse as to whos form of electricity would be used alternating and edison was determined he didnt want his form of the current used in the Death Penalty because he was afraid it would discredit his form s succeeded experiments in the park to show how effective the former comment would be. When mentioning of the elephant or the hanging, so what he wanted to show is that westinghouse would be more effective. Why do i tell you that . The new York State Commission examined the electrocution and said it is a complicated thing. Many of the people that are on deatwho are ondeath row are nott physical shape. Some are radically overweight. Its hard to find a name. Some are intravenous drug users. The American Medical Association doesnt want doctors performing lethal injection to even the ones that you imagine are being performed by relatively untrained prison personnel. It was so bad that they had to go to the growing area. So we can imagine and thats what this book tries to describe always trying to imagine the next reliable, efficient, Humane Technology. So i think the focus should be on the reality of the practices that we have because those are the problems that have driven us from one to another. What is the number did you mention . Back about 276. There were little less than 9,000 executions. As more and more botched executions took place im sure there were lawyers to decide how do we govern this process and im asking about the case law. The case law on the technology that can impose any more pain than is necessary in todays case the supremthe basecase thee technology imposes a substantial risk of a significant harm than it is constitutionally unacceptable. The legal regulations occur mostly at the legislative level. So you can go to the various states and see their protocol for how an execution is to occur in fact that is how we were able to figure out what the botched execution was but it was highly legally regulated. Perhaps the most favorite prior to the one that happened in oklahoma havoklahoma happened ia in the 1940s and in the case that was decided by the court was louisiana had a statute prescribed that it had to be by the electrocution and it described what was supposed to have been. So the regulation of the form of execution can be and is quite detailed. It may i share with you some information . If i were to ask you what the state has the highest percentage of executions since the introduction roughly since 1981 states do you think it would be . Its roughly 4 . The states with the highest rate of the executions are forever where 18 have been botched, ohio where 18 of the executions are botched roughly one out of five. Again roughly one out of five. Why do i tell you that . Because they have explicit regulations and protocols for how execution is supposed to happen. But remember what i said earlier. The problem is that when the execution happens it is written off as an accident. There is nothing wrong with the technology, nothing wrong with the protocol. [inaudible] we try to litigate this all the time. What the court does is the court articulated standard. Ththe standards of standard is m of execution poses a substantial risk that the form of execution is unconstitutional and then the lawyers litigate it and what happens as the judges decide that this was just an accident. Not a problem of lethal injection into the question if we only had a better form, that is part of the way in which they are mere accident. I think that you have been working up to inexperience but i wonder if you have an to make a botched execution departs from the protocol of the Standard Operating Procedure. We try to identify and use that which was politically neutral. So this is what the state law says and this is what happened. Concerning the media coverage, to what extent if at all do you think that perhaps the race of the offender or the nature of the crime has affected the way that it might be represented in the popular media. I havent found much evidence of that. I think the large question to ask about the botched execution and why this object is a kind of dangerous one for abolitionists is because the response is often look what they did. He died in a terrible way but after all his crime was to bury someone alive. So, to take on the baggage of the execution, for the abolitionists they need to explain why they were concerned with the fate of the condemned or not of the victim. How we punish is as much about us and who we want to be and who we aspire to be its about what we do to those that we punish it is a question that in the context of the botched execution transcends the question of the race or circumstances of the condemned. With respect to the questions about the guilt determination and who gets the Death Penalty. But i dont think they carry much weight in the media coverage. At least the coverage wasnt explicitly engaged with the lockets race. It seems like the last public hanging was 1935. What has happened in the spectacle also has to do with ideas of cruelty. So i was wondering why its gruesome spectacles and for whom . So, i was asked to think about this book in light of a lot of other work ive done the Death Penalty and the i mentiond that one of the concerns i had been thinking about Capital Punishment is to get us to understand in light of the democratic values. It is a spectacle even if it isnt spectacular and that is the hope of the lethal injection to take the spectacular out of execution. That is a possibility of a democratic society. And by the way, the executions are always with us. We dont know whose name and the execution is carried out. Now you help me with my worry, so i thinking about mercy killing because we are now in a society with an aging population and it is of a rising interest in allowing the mercy killing and thinking that is all for the good, people that are superannuated and people who are ill and i would imagine and i know some of these procedures would be lethal injections so that once that is perfected there would be a push to do th that. Its a question of milligrams per kilogram. Weve got it for the elderly. We have a Reliable Technology and we will be able to use it in the lethal injection but remember the problems are not just problems with the drug cartel. Could we find a drug cocktail that in some way begins to be reliable. It is a question of how it is going to be administered by whom and to whom and what circumstances. It cant be previously used and the states now because of the reluctance of the european manufacturers in the executions in the United States states are desperately searching for chemicals that they can use for the compounding pharmacies and some states now use a preacher of cocktail and others using massive dosage. There is an ai error rate of 3 r 7 is acceptable, its acceptable when the state takes life. It imposes no more pain than necessary and on the extinguishment of life. It is an amount in a percentage of the botched executions, can you talk a little about the equal precedence and how that plays into the cultural perception. With respect to guilt the United States Supreme Court was confronted with a case in which the allegation was that the person was going to be executed was actually innocent. And the United States Supreme Court roughly said actual innocence doesnt matter. The person had a fair trial. And with respect to botched executions, what the courts have said isnt that you have to get it perfect in every case. But the courts have said is that they can give no more pain that is necessary. The issue of the Capital Punishment is an appropriate issue of democratic decisions. It is an issue for the people in the United States through their elected representatives to resolve. And the people of the United States are resolving it. In new jersey and connecticut and maryland and illinois in almost a New Hampshire its going to happen in the state after state. Very few places in posted and very few places now execute. So there is no Legal Standard that says it cant be more than 3 in order for the Death Penalty to be constitutional. But question whether 3 is an acceptable error rate is a question for us as a people to decide. I hope that we get it right. Thank you very much. [applause] [inaudible conversations]