‘AMID THE SECOND TR*MP 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.…

…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.”…’ Charlotte Rosen via The Baffler