‘The heart stops reluctantly’

In the waning days of 2024, Pope Francis renewed his support for ending the death penalty across the world, calling it a tangible expression of hope for 2025. Two weeks later, President Joe Biden commuted the death sentences of nearly 40 people facing execution by the federal government — a dramatic reversal for a politician who, three decades prior, championed the death penalty and took credit for its expansion.

This trajectory was seemingly reversed with the second presidency of Donald Trump, who on the day he was inagurated signed an executive order to “restore” the widespread use of the federal death penalty. He instructed the attorney general to pursue capital punishment even in cases restricted by Supreme Court precedent, encouraged state attorneys general to bring state-level capital charges against those whose federal death sentences were just commuted, and promised to ensure states’ access to the drugs necessary for lethal injection executions.

The whiplash between the changing administrations is an encapsulation of an ongoing debate in the U.S. about the place of capital punishment in modern society.

In this charged atmosphere, Corinna Barrett Lain, Richmond Law's S.D. Roberts and Sandra Moore Professor of Law, is publishing her first book, Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection. In the book, Lain pulls back the curtain on more than 45 years of lethal injection in the U.S., shining a light on where executions go wrong and how state secrecy makes the practice more palatable to an unknowing public.

Her book is seven years in the making, the culmination of five years of research and another two years of searching for a publisher and bringing the book to market.

But Lain believes her book is arriving right on time.

Throughout her 20-plus year career in academia, Lain has cycled between twin interests in constitutional history and the death penalty. When she gets stuck in one area, she shifts focus to the other to allow her thoughts room to simmer and develop.

Nearly a decade ago, Lain was writing a constitutional history article that colleagues thought was better suited for book-length treatment. “They were right,” she says, “but I didn’t want to write a book.” She set that piece aside and started on a second article titled “Disowning Death.”

“The point was to show how, from the beginning to the end of the capital punishment pipeline, the law distances us from the moral choices that the death penalty entails,” Lain says.

She received encouraging feedback from other scholars but hit a wall when she reached the final section of the paper — the section on lethal injection. She couldn’t find any research on the point she wanted to make.

“In my mind, this was so obvious. Lethal injection is about disowning death,” she says. “It doesn’t even look like the state is killing. It looks more like what happens when we put down a beloved pet — a death that doesn’t look like death.”

This appearance of a humane death is how states have positioned lethal injection for decades. To challenge this stance, Lain would have to pioneer a new path. “This was the central tension in my argument, and I could not find [the research] anywhere.”

Lain spoke with a fellow death penalty scholar who confirmed that no one had done the work she wanted to cite. If she needed this to continue her work, he told her, Lain would have to develop the study herself.

“He convinced me that as someone who writes in the ‘court and culture’ space, I was uniquely situated to make the point I wanted to make,” Lain says. “Plus my constitutional history work had given me the research skills to tackle a topic shrouded in secrecy.”

Another question surfaced as Lain continued her studies. “We know how to put down pets,” Lain says. “We know how physician-assisted suicide works. Why is it so hard for states to get lethal injection right?”

After a year of groundbreaking research, Lain had her answer — and it also proved her case that lethal injection was about disowning death, not providing a humane one.

She sat down to start writing. “By the end of part one, I had over 300 footnotes,” she says. “That’s when I realized, uh-oh, it’s a book. That led to some real soul-searching. I had already put down my legal history piece for the very reason that I didn’t want to write a book.

“There’s a whole faith story about why I went forward with [writing this book], and the beautiful journey that this choice began,” Lain says, noting that the testimony is available on her author website.

“It was a personal decision to move forward with the project knowing it would take me out of mainstream publishing for several years,” she says. “But it is also one of the best professional decisions I have ever made.”

The details of lethal injection are widely hidden from the public — and that’s by design. Other methods, like the electric chair and the firing squad, put the brutality of the death penalty at the forefront. Lethal injections conceal the violence of state killing, offering the illusion that prisoners simply drift off to a painless sleep in the hands of a medical practitioner. This veneer, Lain says, makes the death penalty easier for citizens to support.

“For most Americans, support for the death penalty is support in the abstract. Lethal injection keeps the death penalty abstract,” she writes in the introduction to the book. “It allows the political uses to flourish while hiding the brutality that executions entail.” Lain thinks this is why lethal injection accounts for nearly 98% of all U.S. executions. Out of sight, out of mind.

Lethal injection appears peaceful. But in truth, Lain says, torturous deaths by lethal injection are the rule, not the exception. It’s just that sometimes we see it — when executioners spend hours struggling to insert an IV or a prisoner is injected with the wrong drug — and most times we don’t. Several states have temporarily paused executions to review the practice in detail.

Even when executions go as planned, death by lethal injection is hardly the gentle process it’s made out to be. A 2020 study of more than 200 lethal injection autopsies found that 84% showed evidence that prisoners suffered from acute pulmonary edema as they died — they drowned in their own fluids.

“It’s no exaggeration to say that we are essentially waterboarding these people to death,” Lain says.

By the time she finished the manuscript, Lain had examined litigation files, scientific studies, autopsy reports, academic research across an array of fields, and a treasure trove of articles by investigative journalists. “The journalists are the real heroes in my story,” she says. “The stuff they found was unbelievable. My job was to contextualize their stories in light of everything else I found and put it all together in an accessible way.

“The picture of lethal injection that emerges is astounding,” Lain says. “The reason states can’t get lethal injection right is that lethal injection is nothing like what we think.” The traditional three-drug protocol every death penalty state used during a 30-year span was devised by someone with no expertise — experiential or academic — in the field.

Later protocols were devised by lawyers using Google search. Lain found states knowingly violating state and federal drug laws. These states made straw purchases through other state agencies, falsified prescriptions, and made drug buys in cash, paying $10,000 or more to questionable suppliers.

The medical staging used in lethal injection — gurneys, alcohol swabs, and executioners in white coats — are just theater created by people who aren’t doctors. The serene expressions that some executed prisoners show are caused by a relaxant that softens the facial muscles, not an actual sense of serenity.

As a former prosecutor, Lain supported the death penalty conceptually, though she never had a capital case. It wasn’t until she entered academia and studied the death penalty that Lain learned of its many injustices. In an early paper, she studied a case where a defendant’s lawyer fell asleep during the capital trial and an appellate court upheld the verdict. Time and again, she found blatant failures of the law.

“I’ve come to think of the death penalty as involving two questions,” Lain says. “We tend to only ask one: Does the defendant deserve to die? But that’s just half of the equation. The other half is: Does the state deserve to take that life? All too often, the answer to that question is no.

“Public approval of the death penalty is based on a number of assumptions,” Lain says. “People assume that defendants will have good legal counsel, that the death penalty will not be arbitrary, that we will not torture people to death. None of those assumptions turn out to be true. It’s just that people don’t know it.”

At a time when the current administration is doubling down on the death penalty, Lain’s book aims to inform the public about what the state is doing in their name, bringing new attention to longstanding questions about whether states can be trusted to kill at all.

By 2022, after five years of research and writing, Lain had a completed manuscript. Despite the book’s detailed research, Lain knew her work wasn’t purely for academics and scholars.

“Death penalty scholars already know how bad the death penalty is,” Lain says. “They won’t be shocked to learn that it’s terrible at the end, too. But the average person thinks that lethal injection is careful, competent, humane. It is not.”

Lain found an agent, but trade press publishers repeatedly turned her book down. Six months later, a happenstance meeting changed everything.

She was at a conference in Puerto Rico speaking about the role of language in distancing us from the realities of our punishment practices.

“We don’t say ‘kill,’” Lain told her audience. “We use words like ‘execution,’ but the autopsy says ‘homicide.’ We are intentionally killing. That’s what the death penalty is.”

The same is true with other punishment practices, she says. “We ‘imprison’ people. We don’t say we ‘cage’ them, but that’s what we’re doing. The fact that this seems like a blatantly emotional ploy, rather than plain truth, is a testament to just how effective language is at separating us from the reality of the carceral state.”

At the conference, Lain walked by the booth of New York University Press, which she had heard published books aimed at both academics and the general public. She stopped to ask if this was true. The representative confirmed this, adding that she was the person who worked on books for the general public.

Shortly thereafter, NYU Press offered Lain a contract. “NYU Press has been the perfect partner to get Secrets of the Killing State on shelves this spring,” she says, noting that the press chose an Easter release date six months prior to Pope Francis calling on Catholics to support an end to the death penalty.

Today, there are more than 2,000 people on death row in the U.S., and the death penalty is legal in 27 states and at the federal level. Families of victims think that sentencing perpetrators to death will give them closure. Lain thinks that’s an illusion.

“The very thing that family members are told will bring them closure takes anywhere from 15 to 20 to 25 years,” she says. “And during that time, their lives are on hold. These families lose not only their loved ones but also decades of their lives. It’s the exact opposite of closure.”

In those years between sentencing and execution, a perpetrator may not be the same person they were. In the case of Missouri’s Brian Dorsey, for example, more than 70 corrections officers called on the governor to commute Dorsey’s sentence to life without parole. After 17 years on death row, they argued that Dorsey had proven the potential for rehabilitation and redemption. He lived in the prison’s honor dorm and served as the prison barber, even cutting the hair of the prison’s warden and staff.

Taking Dorsey’s life, one officer argued, would be traumatizing for the staff members who had come to care for him. But Lain says the death penalty is difficult to stop once put into action. The governor declined to intervene, and the U.S. Supreme Court rejected his final appeals.

Dorsey was executed by lethal injection in April 2024.

“I felt a deep sorrow, and frankly shame, knowing that this extraordinary exemplar of redemption was about to be killed by the prison staff who had come to know and respect him,” Lain wrote in the book’s epilogue.

“The purpose of lethal injection is not about a humane death,” Lain says. “It’s about a humane-looking death. I once read that ‘the heart stops reluctantly.’ The body wants to keep living. It takes force to end life before the body is ready to let it go. It could be a car accident, it could be a murder, it could be anything — but it takes violence to overcome the body’s natural inclination to live.

“Lethal injection hides the violence so we don’t have to think about what the state is doing. My book aims to change that.” ■

Editor's note: An excerpt of Lain's book, Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection, was published on History News Network shortly after the release of this article. Click here to read it.