Deborah Denno, an expert on capital punishment, discusses in Verdict whether attentiveness to a death penalty audience’s reactions, and to its outrage and revulsion at what it views as cruelty, will help give content to the “evolving standards of decency” that have animated and developed the Eighth Amendment through the years.
This formula goes wrong, however, when the audience is no longer in a position to be able to detect whether and to what degree a prisoner is suffering during the course of an execution. Though the witnesses are “right there” and thus might feel like they truly know what is going on, the drugs used in lethal injection protocols make this perception of knowledge illusory, as Professor Deborah Denno has discussed in her extensive work on the death penalty and lethal injection. Drugs that paralyze a prisoner and stop his heart, though horribly painful if the prisoner is conscious, simultaneously make his pain invisible to viewers. The very drugs that torture him lock him into that torture so that he may, in many cases, be completely unable, visually or audibly, to convey his suffering to the witnesses around him.
Read the full Verdict article here.