Deborah Denno comments to the Christian Science Monitor on Tennessee’s back-up plan, as the use of drugs to execute convicted prisoners is increasingly is challenged on legal and ethical grounds: the electric chair.
“They’re ensuring that they have a method of execution,” says Deborah Denno, a professor at Fordham University School of Law and an expert on the history of capital punishment in the US. “They’re playing it safe, so to speak.”
That Tennessee has chosen an execution method from the past is an unusual move, she says. States typically have tried one method of execution, then abandoned it for a new procedure thought to be an improvement. But states have never before gone backward, she says.
“States have followed this progression, going from one method of execution to another,” Professor Denno says. “A state wanting to go back to what we had before is unprecedented. We’re regressing.”
If Tennessee does decide to use electrocution in an execution, it will likely yield legal war, says Denno.
“Electrocution is really pretty horrible,” she says. “I expect there will a lot of litigation.”
Read the entire Christian Science Monitor article.