Deborah Denno comments to the New York Times on how the recent scarcity of lethal-injection drugs has prompted some death-row states, including Tennessee, to consider retro-style execution, such as the electric chair.
Tennessee’s decision is breathtakingly regressive, according to Deborah W. Denno, a professor at Fordham University School of Law and a national expert on capital punishment. States have historically gone to new methods of execution, she said, from hanging to electrocution, to lethal gas, to lethal injection.
“But they’re going backwards,” Ms. Denno said of Tennessee. “They’re going back to using a method of execution that was basically rejected because it was so problematic. That’s never happened before.”
Read the entire New York Times article.