Abstract
Austin Sarat, Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America's Death Penalty, Stanford University Press, Palo Alto, 2014; 257 pp.: 9780804789165, $24 (cloth)
I read Austin Sarat's Gruesome Spectacles in public – on the train, in my office, on an airplane – and the strong reactions of revulsion and disgust that surrounded me were, I'm sure, a fraction of what Sarat himself probably experienced when discussing his project with others. Nobody likes to think about botched executions, despite the fact that 3 percent of executions go awry. Botched executions have, thus, remained hidden and unproblematized in the context of the death penalty debate, but they are a natural continuation of Sarat's long-term analytical project on the death penalty. In his many previous books about capital punishment, Sarat highlighted the gradual transformation of the death penalty from a public spectacle to a private, sanitized pseudo-medical procedure. This new project assaults the mechanism of state-sanctioned killings by looking in the ‘black box’ of the execution vehicle – the post-accident analysis of the many ways in which it can go horribly, horribly wrong – and in doing so, blurs the distinction between a state-inflicted death gone ‘right’ and ‘wrong’.
The heart of the book is divided into four parts, each addressing one of four execution technologies: hanging, electrocution, lethal gas, and lethal injection. Each part provides a scientific and legal history of an execution method, followed by a few detailed examples of botched executions. The logic of structuring the book chronologically, by method, becomes clearer as one gets to the last two chapters. At that point, the reader is hit by the absurdity and futility of the constant quest to ‘tinker with the machinery of death’ to the point of perfection. While Sarat does not explicitly drive home this point, those familiar with his prior death penalty work cannot avoid the realization that, as technology changes and the death penalty becomes more ‘scientific’ and ‘medical’ (as a ‘civilizing process' of the ‘spectacle of suffering’ per Norbert Elias and Pieter Spierenburg, who I had hoped to see more explicitly referenced in the narrative), botched executions are less and less distinguishable from their supposedly successful counterparts. During the hanging times, there was artistry to the executioner's job, and a ‘right height’ was required to produce the desired ‘executioner's drop’, and in the heyday of the electric chair, a ‘clean’ electrocution was visibly distinguishable from one that produced charring and burning, complete with unpalatable sights and smells. But the two latter chapters show how reading pain on the condemned's body becomes more elusive as the process itself loses its public element and visibility. This is strongly manifested in the lethal gas chapter, in which the botched executions simply take longer than the successful ones. There is no binary of death, but rather a spectrum of pain. The lethal injection era, in which litigation efforts turn toward the hypertechnical and address the minutiae of pseudo-medical procedures, still requires an engagement with the human, and with it, the sometimes-failed effort to locate the condemned's veins for the injection (which, at least in one case, was so lengthy as to produce a stay of execution). The modernist effort to excise all forms of suffering and leave ‘just death’, divorced of pain, fails even in these presumably ideal scientific conditions.
Sarat is never heavy-handed about these transformations, during his narrative or in his conclusion; if anything, the book was edited a bit too lightly. I, for one, would have liked to know better whether Sarat's thoughts about the historical transformation he describes confirm my own. But the graphic, vivid descriptions of botched executions inevitably generate these grim contemplations, and perhaps it was a wise and respectful choice to leave the explicit conclusions to the reader.
Sarat's descriptions of the cases themselves are also notable and thoughtful. Almost in each case, the story begins with the last part of the ordeal – the botched execution itself – and then broadens the lens into a flashback, detailing the condemned person's life circumstances from infancy, his or her crimes, post-conviction life in prison, and the last days immediately prior to the execution, down to last meals and last words. The repetitive format of this narrative pattern serves the purpose of the book. First, we experience visceral horror and revulsion at the bare facts of the botched execution. Then, we come to hear more about the background of the condemned and his/her crime, bringing to the forefront of our thinking questions of guilt, culpability, social responsibility, and the inevitable comparison between the horrific fate of the condemned and that of his or her victim. Finally, the framing in the context of the person's last days humanizes them – meals, last words, fear of death, as part of the basic human experience.
The historical narrative raises two more important general themes. The first is the relationship between human execution and animal euthanasia. In several cases, improvements to execution methods for humans have followed extensive experimentation on animals, sometimes with the blessing of animal welfare organizations that sought a humane method of causing death. I found this angle, mentioned several times but only in passing, incredibly generative and thought-provoking, as it symbolizes the liminal place between human and animal and speaks volumes about questions of empathy and compassion. The second is the tendency of death technologists in the domestic criminal justice scene to borrow from, and simultaneously distance their project from, the context of warfare and massive death. The association between a sui-generis process and the more public, massive cruelty of wartime devastation cynically highlights the futility of seeking humaneness in an industry of killing.
In the conclusion, Sarat identifies historical trends in media coverage of botched executions. His account identifies several trends in newspaper coverage. In the ‘yellow journalism’ era he uncovers two companion narratives: sensationalism (through graphic, dramatic descriptions of the body in pain and through the reactions of witnesses) and recuperation (through professional assurances that, in fact, the condemned could not have suffered.) With the advent of professional, objective journalistic standards, an objective reporting narrative emerges, which occasionally is so sanitized that it obfuscates discerning the problem and sometimes completely omits reference to the wrong, problematic procedure. Sarat opines that these narratives, which shield the public from true realization of botched executions, are to blame for the failure of botched executions to figure in anti-death penalty advocacy. Moreover, as Sarat points out, much of the media coverage of botched executions takes the form of critique against particular methods of execution, yielding more ‘tinkering with the machinery of death’ in an effort to find the ultimate way to divorce killing from cruelty rather than a wholesale critique of capital punishment. I find Sarat's analysis convincing, but strongly suspect there are other psychological mechanisms at play. Botched executions place the public in a conflicted and difficult place, between the basic revulsion and empathy on the most basic level with another human's suffering and the inevitable comparison between the condemned's death and that of the victim. It takes the conversation about the death penalty back to the time in which the US conversation, like the European one, revolved around justice and human rights, rather than utilitarianism and deterrence. Thus, it is a difficult argument to contain for death penalty supporters and opponents alike, certainly more difficult to digest than the ‘new abolitionist’ arguments based on efficiency and cost.
I finished the book feeling that I read something difficult, uncomfortable, repulsive, but that my life is better and richer for knowing the ugly story within its pages. I can't imagine Sarat intended to write an enjoyable book; rather, his project was one of exposure and revelation. The book succeeds in holding up a mirror to US society, which, if gazed at carefully enough, reveals an extremely ugly feature. It also succeeds in evoking feelings and generating thoughts, and respectfully leaves the readers to their own conclusions on how this newly realized ugly feature changes the rest of the picture. I walk away from the book convinced that the malfunctions of the death penalty are not rare aberrations, but rather a liminal source of grave critique of the questionable enterprise to divorce a state-administered killing from the inevitable human experience of pain and suffering. In this, the book is an important success and a valuable contribution not only to our knowledge about the death penalty but also to the cause of abolition and its advocacy.