Virtual Book Club: May 2023

Bring your favorite beverage as we discuss Austin Sarat's important work exposing lethal injection's failure to provide an alternative to cruel and unusual punishment!  

"With a history marked by incompetence, political maneuvering, and secrecy, America's "most humane" execution method is anything but.

"From the beginning of the Republic, this country has struggled to reconcile its use of capital punishment with the Constitution's prohibition of cruel punishment. Death penalty proponents argue both that it is justifiable as a response to particularly heinous crimes, and that it serves to deter others from committing them in the future. However, since the earliest executions, abolitionists have fought against this state-sanctioned killing, arguing, among other things, that the methods of execution have frequently been just as gruesome as the crimes meriting their use. Lethal injection was first introduced in order to quell such objections, but, as Austin Sarat shows in this brief history, its…