The continuing controversy surrounding America’s reliance on lethal injection for capital punishment was vividly on display in the four executions Arkansas carried out last week. Two of those executions were marked by serious problems. Last Monday, it took almost an hour to find a vein and complete the execution of Jack Jones. And a witness to Thursday night’s execution of Kenneth Williams said the condemned man was “coughing, convulsing, lurching, (and) jerking” after the administration of midazolam, which was supposed to make him unconscious and insensate.



But most commentary about those specific mishaps has ignored the fact that the difficulties with lethal injection can neither be attributed solely to the use or misuse of a single drug nor solved by any combination of drugs. Those problems are variations of the same problems that have beset every execution method that, over the last century and more, America has tried in the hopes of putting people to death in a safe, reliable, and humane manner.

Since the earliest recorded execution in the United States in 1608, our country has put to death approximately 16,000 men and women. Throughout most of that time, we relied on hanging to carry out executions. However, from the end of the nineteenth century to the present day, the U.S. has sought new ways to impose death without unnecessary pain. The continuing search for an execution method that would prove unfailingly humane and civilized has successfully assuaged the sensibilities of the American public, but utterly failed to set capital punishment apart from the heinous crimes it is used to punish.

Through successive changes in methods of execution—from hanging to electrocution, gas chamber to lethal injection—the U.S. has struggled to make the practice of capital punishment appear peaceful and precise and transform execution from dramatic spectacle to a cool, bureaucratic operation. But this struggle has never borne fruit. In recent research, I and my collaborators examined all American executions from 1890-2010. We found that 3 percent of those executions were botched in one way or another.

Each of America’s methods of execution has come with its own distinctive set of problems which have, in time, fueled the search for alternatives.