The Shady Business of Lethal Injection: Out of Sight, Out of Mind

It Could Happen Here

Content provided by iHeartPodcasts and Cool Zone Media. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by iHeartPodcasts and Cool Zone Media or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://podcastplayer.com/legal.

1d ago 42:47

MP3•Episode home

In the second episode of the lethal injection series, Steve Monacelli and Michael Phillips interview Dick Reavis, a journalist who witnessed the world’s first execution by lethal injection, that of Charlie Brooks in Texas in 1982. They report on how the lethal injection method was improvised after a Dallas reporter won a temporary court order allowing television stations to broadcast executions. Worried that a televised electrocution might turn the public against the death penalty, Texas politicians instead approved lethal injection. An Oklahoma coroner who admitted he had no expertise in chemistry and knew a lot about dead bodies but not “how to get them that way,” improvised the three-drug protocol eventually used by all death-penalty states, with horrifying results. Then, Monacelli and Phillips interview law professor Corinna Lain, who says that rather than a supposedly painless death, lethal injection is more like a slow drowning.

Sources:

Corinna Barrett Lain, Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection (New York: New York University Press, 2025.)

Dick Reavis, “Charlie Brooks’ Last Words,” Texas Monthly (February 1983.)

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

1405 episodes

#Current Affairs #Society #News #Politics #Daily News #iHeartPodcasts #Book Club