Deborah Denno talks to MSNBC about Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam’s (R) approval of state legislation to allow using the electric chair to execute criminals if the chemicals for a lethal injection are unavailable.
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 MSNBC article.