The death penalty in America is a highly symbolic issue whose chief utility (as this group surely knows!) lies more in politics than crime control. The fact that the death penalty is reserved exclusively for the underclass and inflicted disproportionately upon black and brown bodies plays an important role in these political uses, and lethal injection is the glue that holds it all together. Lethal injection camouflages the violence of state killing, allowing the death penalty's political uses to flourish without drawing attention to the dirty work that executions entail. This presentation is about the various things that this arrangement sweeps under the rug, and will be highlighted from my manuscript "Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection." You know it's bad, but it's even worse than you think.
https://vimeo.com/809343456
Death Penalty Exceptionalism and Administrative Law (2021):
https://repository.belmont.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1082&context=lawreview Disrupting Death: How Specialized Capital Defenders Ground Virginia’s Machinery of Death to a Halt (2021)
https://scholarship.richmond.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3302&context=lawreview Death Penalty Drugs and the International Moral Marketplace (2015)
https://scholarship.richmond.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2154&context=law-faculty-publications
