Deborah Denno was quoted in a Popular Science article about lethal injection as a form of capital punishment.
But the push to keep the execution chamber stocked with lethal injection drugs may be misguided. While death by drug has become the execution method of choice in the past few decades—all of the 31 death penalty states use it—injection is more likely to go wrong than any other method, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
“It’s always been problematic,” says Deborah Denno, a law professor at Fordham University who studies execution methods. “That said, it’s gotten worse.”
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Even if the South Carolina bill becomes law, whether the public has an appetite for electrocution in 2018 remains to be seen. Reports of prolonged, painful deaths in the electric chair still linger in the public memory, Denno says. “I personally don’t think electrocution is going to go anywhere. There’s a botched history and also a racial history.”
But there’s one antiquated execution method shunned by society that may be worth revisiting by death penalty supporters, she says: guns.
“The evidence suggests firing squad is the most humane,” says Denno, who examined the method in a 2016 paper in the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform. “People think they are the most barbaric, because it doesn’t have a sort of gauze over it like lethal injection, no pretense over it being anything but killing somebody. But it’s such a direct method.”