Among the many ways a college sophomore could imagine spending her summer, compiling a database of botched executions in American history is probably not high on the list. It would, after all, entail trolling through thousands of names, dates, and heinous crimes—then studying old newspaper articles to determine which of those hangings, electrocutions, gassings, and lethal injections had gone awry.
But Madeline Sprung-Keyser took on the challenge with relish and now says it was a transformative experience. In the spring of 2011, she and five classmates had just finished taking a special research tutorial, “America’s Death Penalty,” at Amherst College with Austin Sarat, a noted expert on the subject. They read academic articles, Skyped with authors, wrote papers, and debated the meaning and subtext of America’s complex relationship with the death penalty.
Creating the database was the next step, one that would ultimately lead to a book. Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty (Stanford University Press), released last month, was written by Mr. Sarat, a professor of jurisprudence and political science, with help from Ms. Sprung-Keyser and three of her classmates.
After a painstaking review of the ways 9,000 people were put to death in the United States from 1890 to 2010, the researchers found that about 3 percent of executions had not gone as planned: decapitations and failed strangulation during hangings, for example. Burned flesh and repeated jolts of electricity with electrocution. Severe pain and slow deaths during lethal injections.
Each new advance in technology promised a less-painful ending. But the evolution of the death penalty, the book argues, says more about our hopeful view of scientific progress and how we wish to handle the fate of the guilty. That message is a particularly timely one: Shortly after the book’s release an Oklahoma inmate suffered an execution gone wrong, dying of a heart attack 43 minutes after being injected with a lethal cocktail of drugs.
His death made international headlines and led President Obama to order a review of how the death penalty is applied in the United States. But it came as no surprise to Mr. Sarat and his researchers. They found that lethal injection—far from being a technological improvement over previous methods of execution—is among the most problematic: Seven percent of those executions have not gone according to plan.
For Ms. Sprung-Keyser, now a student at the New York University School of Law, the rigorous and sustained study of the death penalty changed her life. “It influenced not only the way I think academically and the way I think intellectually,” she says. “It influenced the idea to go to law school and the way I think about broader issues in the world.”
For Mr. Sarat, as rewarding as writing the book has been, involving undergraduates in the process has been equally important, he says. His research tutorial on the death penalty is one of nine such courses being taught at Amherst today. They are financed by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and designed to foster research collaborations among students and faculty members in the humanities and social sciences. The other tutorials cover such topics as Shakespeare and the history of books, suicide as a form of protest, and the senses in motion.
“We need to move students to think of themselves as scholars, capable of producing knowledge and information,” says Mr. Sarat, who helped secure the Mellon grant when he was a senior adviser to the dean of the faculty and looking for ways to engage undergraduates more deeply in research. “We’re doing that in science, but not in the social sciences and humanities.”
Execution Out of Sight
In telling the history of bungled executions, Gruesome Spectacles lays out America’s complicated relationship with the death penalty, dating to hangings in Colonial times. Capital punishment then was a public affair, meant to display the government’s power over life and death.
But as people became less comfortable with such spectacles, the demand for more private and seemingly humane forms of executions grew. Electrocution, the gas chamber, and lethal injection have all taken a turn as the method of choice.
“We give them a kinder, gentler death than they deserve to mark the boundary between the ‘civilized’ and the ‘savage,’ rather than to establish a connection between citizens and murderers,” writes Mr. Sarat. “We kill humanely, not out of concern for the condemned but rather to vividly establish a hierarchy between the law-abiding and the lawless.”
Mr. Sarat hopes Gruesome Spectacles advances the public debate about the death penalty by showing that there is no such thing as a foolproof, humane way to kill someone.
“The debate has moved from high moral principles to looking at how the system actually operates. That move has largely focused on the fate of the innocent,” he says. “I hope my book takes that move and says, OK, let’s look at the fate of the guilty. Is 3 percent an acceptable error rate for execution? If I were to tell you that three out of every 100 airplane takeoffs result in a crash, you might think, Gee, that’s not an acceptable error rate.”
Support for the death penalty has declined in recent years. The number of people sentenced to death has fallen, and the percentage of Americans in favor of the death penalty hovers around 60 percent, the lowest level in two decades.
But abolitionists have not often used botched executions to further their cause. Why not? Gruesome Spectacles argues that the news media are partly to blame, portraying them as simple accidents.
“The style varies, but the story tends to be pretty constant,” Mr. Sarat says. “In the early period, they sensationalized botched executions but told what we call recuperative narratives. ‘Oh, it’s just because the hangman was drunk.’ There’s a parallel discourse in the way the legal system has thought about botched executions, in which the question of intent or accident plays a critical role.”
Daniel LaChance, an assistant professor of history at Emory University who has studied capital punishment in the United States, praises Gruesome Spectacles for the systematic way it looks at fumbled executions. “The deep irony is the more we search for modes of painless execution, the worse it gets,” he says.
The book “reminds us once again that a lot of the things we do in the name of seeming civilized are for our own comfort, not for the intended beneficiaries.”
Ms. Sprung-Keyser says studying the death penalty in both theory and practice pushed her to sharpen her own views. “I was very wishy-washy” at the start of the course, she recalls. “I had moral issues with it, but not necessarily intellectual issues.”
The process of digesting and debating enormous amounts of information forced her and her classmates to think critically about, for example, the ever-shifting definition of “cruel and unusual punishment.”
Some of the most intense debates took place during the writing of the book. Each student was charged with writing the first draft of one chapter. Then the group would hash it out in meetings with Mr. Sarat.
“It was completely collaborative,” she says. “Every step of the way we were having real conversations about what the issues were and what was important.”
Mr. Sarat hopes other professors will be inspired to engage their students in complex research projects.
“It defies the convention: People think research can’t be any good because undergraduates are doing it,” he says. This book proves that idea wrong. “They were fully my collaborators. I learned an enormous amount from them.”
