Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection

Lain (law, Univ. of Richmond) writes a scathing attack on the use of lethal injection to administer the death penalty in the United States. Unlike the seminal works of Austin Sarat (e.g., Lethal Injections and the False Promise of Humane Execution), this book is no academic treatise and instead emphatically raises a litany of problems: the drugs used cause extended suffering, and, as they hide behind secrecy laws, the states use jerry-rigged drug cocktails made by poorly credentialed workers. Lain argues that this amounts to human experimentation for the sake of expediency and political rationales. Like the unsafe meat-packing practices exposed in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, this book attempts to show that practices of administering the death penalty are cruel, arbitrary, and harmful to the public. By shielding these practices from the public, Lain submits, the state masks their brutality. Written in blunt, forceful language, the book concludes: “I don’t trust these people. Do you?”