Austin Sarat, “Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty” (Stanford UP, 2014)

When we discuss the death penalty we usually ask two questions: 1) should the state be in the business of killing criminals?; and 2) if so, how should the state put their lives to an end? As Austin Sarat shows in his fascinating book Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty (Stanford University Press, 2014), these two questions are intimately related. The reason is pretty simple: if the state can’t find a legally and morally acceptable way to execute malefactors, then perhaps we need to ask seriously whether the state should be killing criminals at all. If the means cannot be found, then the end may well be unachievable.

In Gruesome Spectacles, Sarat analyses hundreds of executions in an attempt to assess the degree to which we can kill criminals in legally and morally acceptable ways. What he discovers is that about three in a hundred American executions over the past century or so have gone badly wrong. Criminals who were supposed to have been put to death in a humane way were strangled, decapitated, set on fire, suffocated, and slowly poisoned. Apparently American authorities—however laudable their intentions—have found it quite difficult, practically speaking, to avoid “cruel and unusual punishment” when executing wrongdoers.

It’s important to note that Gruesome Spectacles is not an anti-death penalty book. Sarat’s presentation of botched executions is balanced by consideration of the horrible crimes for which the ultimate penalty was imposed. What Sarat does–and we should thank him for it–is provide hard evidence on a crucial question: can we, realistically speaking, put criminals to death humanely?

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