Professor Deborah Denno was quoted in The Atlantic, in an article discussing Alabama’s execution practices, where she shared her insight on the execution of Joe Nathan James Jr.
Deborah Denno, a law professor and the founding director of the Neuroscience and Law Center at Fordham Law School, emphasized to me that James’s case is only the latest in a long sequence of botched executions that challenge the constitutionality of lethal injection on Eighth Amendment grounds.
“From the very first lethal injection execution to the last—that of Joe Nathan James—the method is predictably disastrous, all the more so in the last dozen years given the lack of availability of drugs,” Denno wrote to me in an email. “James’s execution not only resembles the execution botches of the 1980s, it is even more egregious given the excessive lack of care and prison officials’ indifference to the safeguards of the execution process.”