CHAPTER 1
The Mere Extinguishment of Life?
Technological Efficiency, Botched Executions, and the Legitimacy of Capital Punishment in the United States
On September 28, 1900, the state of North Carolina hanged Art Kinsauls for a murder committed in Sampson County. Born in that county in 1865, Kinsauls had lived there his entire life, marrying a local girl, Posunnie Gibsy Bass, in 1896. Even though Art weighed only 110 pounds, he was said to be âtough as iron.â1 He had the unfortunate habit of getting into violent arguments and carried on a long running feud with John C. Herring, his neighbor. One night when Kinsauls was in Art Vannâs Store at Beamanâs Crossroad, an argument began and then a fight broke out. âKinsauls reached into the meat box and got a sharp butcher knife and stabbed young Herring to such an extent that he died during the night.â2
Kinsauls was arrested a few days after Herringâs death and taken to the county jail in Clinton. With the help of a group of his friends, he soon escaped, and avoided capture for nine months. The sheriff and a posse only recaptured him after a gunfight at his farm, which left him seriously wounded. Brought to trial in October 1899, Kinsauls was found guilty of murder and was sentenced to hang.
On the surface at least, there was nothing remarkable about North Carolinaâs plan for the Kinsauls execution. Hanging had been the primary method of execution in the United States since the founding of the American colonies. It was an inexpensive, low-tech way of putting people to death. Hangings could be handled at the local level, and did not require elaborate execution protocols.3
Kinsauls refused to go quietly. He tried to kill himself twice, first with an overdose of sleeping pills and later by using a tin lid to cut his throat. Both attempts failed, but each resulted in a postponement of his execution. In the meantime, North Carolina governor Daniel Russell received many requests for a reprieve from influential Sampson County citizens, each of which the governor refused.
On the day of the hanging, hundreds of people traveled from all over the county to witness it. The gallows was erected near the jail where Kinsauls had originally been held. As in all its executions, Sampson County used a stepladder as its gallows, but in this instance it failed to do its job. The drop height proved insufficient to break the condemnedâs neck. With Kinsauls suspended at the end of the rope, the attending physician quickly determined that he was still alive.
Compounding the problem was the fact that his neck had only partially healed from his last suicide attempt. As a result, when Kinsauls fell from the stepladder, the rope ripped open his neck wound and left him bleeding profusely. The assembled crowd of friends and neighbors nearly rioted. Undaunted by the failure of their first execution attempt and the increasingly chaotic, bloody scene, officials cut him down, forced him up the ladder again, and repeated the drop. This time the execution succeeded and Kinsauls died. His was the last public hanging in Sampson County.4
Newspapers all over the country took note of the Kinsauls execution. Headlines in the Atlanta Constitution, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Republic (St. Louis, Missouri) announced that it had not gone as planned. For example, the Washington Post titled its article âMurderer Hanged Twice.â5 The stories, in turn, used vivid language to convey the horror of Kinsaulsâs last minutes on earth. The Post described a âGhastly Gallows Scene,â6 and the Virginian Pilot called it a thoroughly ârevolting execution.â
Almost a century later, in March 1997, American newspapers carried stories of another botched executionâthe electrocution of Pedro Medina, a thirty-nine-year-old Cuban immigrant convicted and condemned for stabbing a Florida high school teacher to death.7 After the current was turned on, as one newspaper put it, flames âleaped from the headâ of the condemned. ââIt was horrible,â a witness was quoted as saying, âa solid flame covered his whole head, from one side to the other. I had the impression of somebody being burned alive.ââ8 Another reporter wrote, âThe electrocution of Pedro Medina on Tuesday was the stuff of nightmares and horror fiction novels and films. A foot-long blue and orange flame shot from the mask covering his head for about 10 seconds, filling the execution chamber with smoke and sickening witnesses with the odor of charred human flesh.â9
Yet news reports also conveyed the âreassuringâ reaction of Dr. Belle Almojera, medical director at Florida State Prison, who said that before the apparatus caught fire Medina already had âlurched up in his seat and balled up his fistsâthe normal reaction to high voltage. . . . âI saw no evidence of pain or suffering by the inmate throughout the entire process. In my professional opinion, he died a very quick, humane death.ââ10 The Florida Supreme Court found that âMedinaâs brain was instantly and massively depolarized within milliseconds of the initial surge of electricity. He suffered no conscious pain.â11 And others defended his botched electrocution by noting that it âwas much more humane than what was done to the victim.â12
Despite these attempts to contain adverse public reaction, the Medina execution, like the Kinsauls execution before it, made headlines because it suggested that the quest for a painless, and allegedly humane, technology of death was by no means complete. Both botched executions remind us of the ferocity of the stateâs sovereign power over life itself. At the same time, these news stories also offered capital punishmentâs supporters a hint of relief. Most stories treated Medinaâs electrocution as a mere technological glitch rather than as an occasion to rethink the practice of state killing itself. Floridaâs Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel opined, for example, that the state âis justified in imposing the death penalty. . . . But it has no justification for retaining a method . . . that is so gruesome and violent and sometimes flawed.â13 What might have been a challenge to the legitimacy of the killing state was quickly written off as Floridaâs failure to keep up with the technology of the times.
Botched executions, like those of Kinsauls and Medina, have been, and remain, an important part of the story of capital punishment in the United States. From the beginning, American execution practices have been designed to differentiate lawâs violence from violence outside the lawâto sharply set capital punishment apart from the crimes the law condemns. This was especially true in the twentieth century, when enormous efforts were made to put people to death quietly, invisibly, and bureaucratically.14 The course of the last century is littered with various technologiesâhanging, firing squad, electrocution, the gas chamber, lethal injectionâused in a continuing effort to find an apparently humane means by which the state could take life.15 Executions, in this system, are not supposed to make headlines.
Headlines today tell of a remarkable transformation in Americaâs death penalty. Over the course of the last decade, death sentences and executions have both fallen dramatically.16 We now impose fewer death sentences and execute fewer people than at any time in a quarter century. These changes have been driven by concerns about the reliability of the death penalty system in fairly adjudicating guilt and innocence, and in differentiating those who deserve a death sentence from those who do not. In addition, today the stateâs dealing in death is linked to a concern for technological efficiency. We are invited, following Dr. Almojera, to imagine the body as a legible text, readable for what it can tell us about the capacity of technology to move us from life to death, swiftly and painlessly17âto ensure that execution is nothing more than âthe mere extinguishment of life.â
But why should the state care about the suffering of those it puts to death? Painful death might be more just and more effective as a deterrent than a death that is quick, quiet, and tranquil. Because justice would seem to demand equivalence between pain inflicted in the crime and the pain experienced as part of the punishment, there is something unsettling and paradoxical about the stateâs constant search for a painless way of killing those who kill. As Arlene Blanchard, a survivor of Timothy McVeighâs 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, in which 168 people were killed, explained after McVeighâs death sentence was handed down, âdeath by injection is âtoo goodâ for McVeigh.â She said he should be put in solitary confinement for life or simply hanged from a tree. âI know it sounds uncivilized, but I want him to experience just a little of the pain and torture that he has put us through.â18 Or, as William Baay, an emergency worker who helped remove bodies from the Murrah building, put it, âI donât think conventional methods should be used. They should amputate his legs with no anesthesia . . . and then set him over a bunch of bamboo shoots and let them grow up into him until heâs dead.â19
Even as capital punishment seeks to do justice and/or satisfy the public desire for vengeance, the state has countervailing concerns. It must distinguish execution from the acts to which it is a supposedly just response. The state must also find ways of killing in a manner that does not allow the condemned to become an object of pity, or to appropriate the status of the victim. But despite determined claims to the contrary, capital death never simply means death. Rather, since its inception, it has been inextricably tied to the instruments used to carry it out. The legitimacy of state killing depends largely on execution method. Technology mediates between the state and death by masking physical pain and allowing citizens to imagine that execution is clean, efficient, and painless.
When executions go wrong, they signal a break in the ritualization and routinization of state killing. Such mishaps can turn the organized, state-controlled ritual into torture. Solemn spectacles of sovereign power morph into horrible events and critical attention gets focused on the evolving execution technologiesâand, even more intently, on their failures.
Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and Americaâs Death Penalty examines the history of botched executions in the United States from 1890 to 2010, a period in which approximately 3 percent of all executions were botched.20 Botched executions occur when there is a breakdown in, or departure from, the âprotocolâ for a particular method of execution. The protocol can be established by the norms, expectations, and advertised virtues of each method or by the governmentâs officially adopted execution guidelines. Botched executions are âthose involving unanticipated problems or delays that caused, at least arguably, unnecessary agony for the prisoner or that reflect gross incompetence of the executioner.â21 Examples of such problems include, among other things, inmates catching fire while being electrocuted, being strangled during hangings (instead of having their necks broken), and being administered the wrong dosages of specific drugs for lethal injections.
Of approximately nine thousand capital sentences carried out in the United States from 1890 to 2010, we know of 276 that were botchedâ79 from 1900 to 1919, 70 from 1920 to 1949, 23 from 1950 to 1979, and 104 from 1980 to 2010 (see Appendix A).22 This book describes the problems that have plagued the technologies of state killing in an effort to understand those numbers as well as how and why things go wrong during executions. It tells the story of Americaâs death penalty through the eyes of those whose executions have gone terribly wrong (see Appendix B).
The book focuses on 1890â2010, which was a crucial period in the transformation of Americaâs capital punishment from its traditional to its more modern form. It was, in addition, a critical period in what death penalty historian Stuart Banner calls âthe continual centralization and professionalization of punishment,â23 and in the development of new technologies of execution. In this context, one might expect that botched executions would have undermined the death penaltyâs legitimacy. As Chris Greer argues,
Botched executions are of particular interest for at least two obvious reasons. First, they represent a direct challenge to the stateâs desired presentation of capital punishment as quick, clean and painless. Secondly, by making the violence inherent in capital punishment clearly visible, and raising questions about the suffering of the condemned, they present abolitionists with an important op...