Book Talk with Corinna Barrett Lain: Secrets of the Killing State
Join us in welcoming Professor Corinna Barett Lain for a discussion of her groundbreaking book, Secrets of The Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection.
More about the book:
In the popular imagination, lethal injection is a slight pinch and a swift nodding off to forever-sleep. It is performed by well-qualified medical professionals. It is regulated and carefully conducted. And it usually provides a "humane" death. In reality, however, not one of those things is true.
Secrets of the Killing State pulls back the curtain on this clandestine punishment practice, presenting a view of lethal injection that states have worked hard to hide. Botched executions are a part of this story, but they are just the tip of the iceberg. For all the suffering that we see, there is also suffering that we don't see. Indeed, the story told here is even bigger than the executions themselves, for behind the scenes is where it unfolds. Fake science, torturous drugs, inept executioners, prison problems, and decades of state secrecy have created an execution method hard-wired to go wrong in countless ways.
The story of lethal injection is a story of gross incompetence, law breaking, torturous deaths, and a stunning indifference to the way in which human beings die at the hands of the state. These are the secrets of the killing state; all that we know from litigation files, scientific studies, investigative journalism, autopsy reports, interviews, and scholarship across a number of fields. Death penalty expert Corinna Barrett Lain uses this groundbreaking journey into the dark reality of lethal injection to shine a light on the American death penalty more broadly and show that the state at its most powerful moment is also the state at its worst.
We are now over 45 years into the lethal injection era, and most Americans still have no idea what states are doing in their name. It's time they found out.
More about the author:
Professor Corinna Lain is the S. D. Roberts & Sandra Moore Professor of Law at the University of Richmond School of Law. Professor Lain’s scholarship focuses on two areas—Supreme Court decision-making and the death penalty—and she has published numerous articles and essays about lethal injection over the last decade. Her work has appeared in the nation’s top law journals, including the Stanford Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Duke Law Journal, UCLA Law Review, and Georgetown Law Journal, among other venues. Professor Lain is a frequent presenter at both national and international conferences, and is co-author (with Ron Bacigal) of the Virginia Practice Series on criminal law, a four-volume treatise for the bench and practicing bar with new editions each year. Professor Lain graduated summa cum laude from the College of William and Mary in 1992, and received her J.D. from the University of Virginia in 1996, where she was elected to Order of the Coif. She clerked on the Tenth Circuit and then was a prosecutor for three years before joining the Richmond Law faculty in 2001. Professor Lain is a recipient of the University of Richmond’s Distinguished Educator Award and is a veteran of the United States Army.