Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America's Death Penalty. By Austin Sarat. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2014. 288 pp. $24.00 cloth.

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12111
• Date: 01 December 2014
• Published date: 01 December 2014

Book Reviews

Jinee Lokaneeta, Editor

Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty.

By Austin Sarat. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2014. 288 pp.

$24.00 cloth.

Reviewed by Daniel LaChance, Department of History, Emory

University

The marketing team at Stanford University Press could not have

picked a more grimly appropriate release date for Austin Sarat’s

latest book, Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death

Penalty. In April of 2014, on the eve of the book’s publication, the

state of Oklahoma botched the execution by lethal injection of

Clayton D. Lockett. After being declared unconscious, Lockett

began writhing and attempted to sit up. Forty-three minutes after

the execution began and seven minutes after officials tried to abort

it, he died of a heart attack. On editorial pages across the world,

writers decried the horror of what appeared to be a torturous,

lingering death.

But such deaths, Sarat shows in his history of executions gone

wrong, have been anything but anomalous in the twentieth and

twenty-first centuries. Working with four collaborators—Katherine

Blumstein, Aubrey Jones, Heather Richard, and Madeline Sprung-

Keyser—Sarat used newspapers to survey 8,776 executions from

1900 to 2010. His sobering finding: 3 percent of all executions

since 1900 have been botched. Over 8.5 percent have been botched

since 1980: Americans have gotten worse, not better, at executing

offenders.

The book is sure to become an essential resource for scholars

wishing to pursue the important theoretical and empirical ques-

tions botched executions raise about the practice of capital punish-

ment in the United States. Beyond giving us an unprecedented

understanding of the frequency and nature of botched executions

(an appendix provides short summaries of each of the 276 botched

executions Sarat and his collaborators found), Gruesome Spectacles

compellingly situates them in a larger history of the American death

penalty. In four chapters dedicated to each mode of execution

(hanging, electricity, lethal gas, and lethal injection), Sarat charts

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Law & Society Review, Volume 48, Number 4 (2014)

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