USA | New book details 'untold story' of lethal injection, chronicling its Oklahoma roots

A new book argues the way states perform executions is inhumane. Sierra Pfeifer sat down with its author to learn about the 'untold story' of lethal injection and Oklahoma’s role in how the condemned are executed.

Lethal injection is the most common form of execution in the United States, designed to appear sterile, swift and humane. But as University of Richmond law professor Corinna Barrett Lain reveals in her forthcoming book, Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection, that perception is far from reality.

Lain’s book pulls back the curtain on the capital punishment practice, tracing the origins of lethal injection to Oklahoma, where the method was first devised.

Decades later, the state remains one of the most active in carrying out executions, with Wendell Grissom set to be the first person executed in Oklahoma in 2025 on March 20.

Also in line to receive the death penalty is a man the state had transferred back from a federal prison to be killed. Richard Glossip, who has been on Oklahoma’s death row for decades, was removed after the Supreme Court threw out his conviction last month.

In Secrets of the Killing State, Lain dismantles the long-held belief that lethal injection is a clean, scientific process. Instead, she exposes a system shrouded in secrecy and plagued by mistakes.

As Oklahoma prepares for another year of capital punishment, KOSU’s Sierra Pfeifer spoke with Lain about her book in advance of its release next month.

TRANSCRIPT:

Sierra Pfeifer: Professor Lain, your book starts off by talking about Clayton Lockett, who was executed in Oklahoma in 2014. For those who don’t remember, what was unique about his death?

Professor Corinna Lain, author of Secrets of the Killing State: Clayton Lockett is the man who woke up in the midst of his execution, in the midst of his 45-minute execution, and tried to get up off of the gurney.

Pfeifer: Why did you choose to start your book off with his story, with Lockett’s story?

Lain: Clayton Lockett’s botched execution was exceptional in only one way – and that is, there are over 3,000 pages of transcripts of interviews where we could piece together, I could piece together, exactly what happened from the words, from the very words, of the people who were involved in it.

Pfeifer: As you write in your book, the way that states perform lethal injections was devised here in Oklahoma by the 1977 Chief Medical Examiner Jay Chapman. What basis did he have for the specific way he designed it?

Lain: He had no basis whatsoever. And he later told an interviewer, ‘I didn’t do any research, I just thought about what was needed based on being under anesthesia myself.’ And he later had this famous line, or at least famous within the circle of those who study this, where he said, ‘I am an expert in dead bodies, but not in how to get them that way.’

Pfeifer: You make the argument death by lethal injection came to prominence because of its ‘out-of-sight, out-of-mind’ nature. Can you elaborate?

Lain: All of the other execution methods, whether it’s gassing, or the electric chair, or firing squad. Every single one of them, the violence, state violence, is explicit. You see the force that it takes to end the body. With lethal injection, that violence is internalized.

And under Jay Chapman’s protocol, the traditional three-drug protocol, it happened under the effects of a paralytic. And that paralytic was important because the paralytic was also a muscle relaxant. And so what it did is it relaxed the muscles in the face to make the person look like they were just falling to sleep and then, it froze them that way. And so what onlookers saw, was a peaceful death. And that way it’s a death like any one of us might want but underneath that paralytic was extreme violence and the autopsies later told the tale of what prisoners were actually experiencing.

People think lethal injection is a mostly humane execution method that sometimes goes wrong for reasons we can’t quite understand. It is not. Botched executions are not random glitches, but rather the spillover effects of a system that is deeply broken. — Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection

Pfeifer: Based on your research, do you think the problems with lethal injection can be fixed, that it can be functional?

Lain: I think, in theory, lethal injection could work. I mean, we put down pets every day, we know how physician’s-assisted suicide works … But I think you can’t read my book and get to the end and say, ‘oh yeah this is workable, we can just fix it.’

There’s all these practical problems that I just think the states were unthinking or perhaps they were just thinking of one thing – which is how lethal injection looks.

So, you know, I feel like the story of lethal injection is a story of all the ways that states can’t get this right and all the ways that they try to cover it up. And taken together, it’s a story of whether the state can be trusted.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

Source: kgou.org,  Sierra Pfeifer, March 6, 2025

"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."

— Oscar Wilde