Execution in America

(1:03) Guest: Austin Sarat, professor of law and political science at Amherst College and author of the 2014 book Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty  Numerous state legislatures are in the process of authorizing alternative methods of executing death row inmates if they run out of drugs used in lethal injection.  Those drugs have become increasingly difficult to obtain for a variety of reasons.  So, Utah lawmakers last week voted to reinstate the firing squad as a backup plan for execution. Electrocution is the backup plan under consideration in Tennessee, Alabama and Virginia. Oklahoma is considering something even more dramatic – a form of the gas chamber that entails death by nitrogen inhalation.  And the irony here, is that all of those methods have fallen out of favor over the years because lethal injection has been seen as more humane.   “The method of execution that has proven to be the most problematic has been lethal injection,” says Sarat.