Execution in America

Execution in America

Top of Mind with Julie Rose - Radio Archive, Episode 28 , Segment 1

Episode: Capital Punishment, Anxiety, Ransomware, Learning Styles

  • Mar 18, 2015 9:00 pm
  • 20:19 mins

(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.

Other Segments

American Heritage

21m

Guest: Grant Madsen, BYU history professor  Of all the aspects of early American history, none seems harder to explain than slavery. In every aspect it seems both wrong and antithetical to how Americans see themselves today. It was based on racism. It required brutal violence to maintain itself. It treated people as property. In short, it violated in almost perfect order the very ideas that animated the American Revolution—the idea that all people are created equal and that governments are instituted to protect the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  It took the nation nearly a hundred years (and a bloody civil war) to end the practice of slavery. It took another century to begin the process of undoing the racism that justified it. Today we continue to talk about and live with the legacy of this “peculiar institution” (as southerners called it).

Guest: Grant Madsen, BYU history professor  Of all the aspects of early American history, none seems harder to explain than slavery. In every aspect it seems both wrong and antithetical to how Americans see themselves today. It was based on racism. It required brutal violence to maintain itself. It treated people as property. In short, it violated in almost perfect order the very ideas that animated the American Revolution—the idea that all people are created equal and that governments are instituted to protect the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  It took the nation nearly a hundred years (and a bloody civil war) to end the practice of slavery. It took another century to begin the process of undoing the racism that justified it. Today we continue to talk about and live with the legacy of this “peculiar institution” (as southerners called it).