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Last week, six members of the United States Supreme Court blessed a cruel and unusual horror show at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tennessee. In lifting a stay and greenlighting the state of Tennessee to execute Christa Pike by lethal injection, SCOTUS set in train a series of grotesque but predictable events. Not only did Tennessee fail to kill Christa Pike, but they then had to rush her to a hospital for life-saving care. Pike’s legal team had warned that this method of execution would be “difficult and perhaps cruel” due to a blood condition and small veins. Pike is currently in critical condition on a ventilator, with burned and blistered arms, according to her lawyers. On this week’s Amicus podcast, Dahlia Lithwick spoke with legal scholar Corinna Barrett Lain, author of Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection, about the many ways Pike’s botched execution ripped the mask off America’s preferred method of medicalized capital punishment. Their conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Dahlia Lithwick: In a country that historically did beheadings, hangings, all sorts of objectively gross executions, the decision was made somewhere along the line to medicalize executions, to make it look like dental surgery. I think you’ve likened it to putting down a dog. It has been sanitized, making it easier to believe we’re not actually torturing a person. Can you talk about that impulse to make it look medical, and all the obfuscation that comes along with it, and how this attempted execution really blew that up?

Corinna Barrett Lain: So when you think of the obfuscation, you know, you might want to ask yourself: Why are they on a gurney? Why do they have white sheets over them? Why are the people inserting the catheter wearing white coats? They’re not doctors. Why are they wearing white coats? Why do we swab the arm with alcohol before injecting the drugs to kill them? It’s ridiculous. It’s all stagecraft. It’s all for us. And when it goes wrong, as it did in Christa Pike’s attempted execution, they lower the blinds. It’s a statement that they lowered the blinds twice, and then they told the media to leave. The media could still hear her back there. So the media knew she was still alive, struggling, in the midst of her execution, and yet they made the media leave.

With medicalization, we assume care, we assume competence, we certainly assume humanity. What my research has shown is that lethal injection, from the start, wasn’t so much about a humane execution as a humane-looking execution. I think an important data point is that a federal court at the time had recognized a First Amendment right to televise executions.........

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