This book tells the story of lethal injection's earliest iterations in the United States, starting with New York state's rejection of that execution method almost a century and a half ago. Sarat recounts lethal injection's return in the late 1970s, and offers novel and insightful scrutiny of the new drug protocols that went into effect between 2010 and 2020. Drawing on rare data, he makes the case that lethal injections during this time only became more unreliable, inefficient, and more frequently botched. Beyond his stirring narrative history, Sarat mounts a comprehensive condemnation of the state-level maneuvering in response to such mishaps, whereby death penalty states adopted secrecy statutes and adjusted their execution protocols to make it harder to identify and observe lethal injection's flaws.

What was once touted as America's most humane execution method is now its most unreliable one. What was once a model of efficiency in the grim business of state killing is now marked by mayhem. The book concludes by critically examining the place of lethal injection, and the death penalty writ large, today.

  Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political        Science and Chair of Political Science at Amherst College. He is the author, most          recently, of Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America's Death                Penalty (Stanford, 2014) and The Death Penalty on the Ballot (2019).