In the aftermath of the South Carolina Supreme Court ruling on July 31 that the death penalty is legal—including firing squad, lethal injection, and electric chair—Fordham Law Professor Deborah Denno, death penalty expert and founding director of Fordham Law’s Neuroscience and Law Center, spoke to The Post and Courier about how several published accounts of executions pre-1976—specifically botched electrocutions—were gruesome.
“It’s been problematic from the very first execution,” said Dr. Deborah Denno, an expert on capital punishment methods at the Fordham University School of Law. “We just have page after page of all the problems associated with electrocution, all the botches over and over again, and they’ve only gotten worse with time.”