Austin Sarat

That's pretty extraordinary.

Livestreaming will not educate, it will terrorize, and is beneath the dignity that we owe to anyone, even those who committed horrific crime such as Hassan's, said Austin Sarat, a legal expert in the death penalty at Amherst College, Massachusetts, told the iPaper.

The decision to livestream the execution is unprecedented in the modern area, And on uncertain legal terrain, John Mills, the lawyer who works with inmates sentenced to death, told the BBC, the live stream may face a legal challenge because federal regulations forbid the visual or audio recording of an execution without a specific judicial order.

From the topic, the economy headline.

"Around each picture is looped the noose in which the criminal died.

Last week, prison attendants added a 17th picture and a 17th rope, thereby memorializing the picture of Mrs. Eva Dugan, 52, first woman executed in Arizona." "Her hanging made national news and set off public outrage in Arizona," Austin Sarat writes, and he credits it with pushing the state to change its method of execution.

In 1933, the 11th Legislature passed House Joint Resolution 4, which sent the voters a constitutional amendment two sentences long.

"The judgment of death shall be inflicted by administering lethal gas.

Um, and all of these different ways that we've devised to kill people.

Um, Austin Sarat, uh, he's got a book on botched executions called Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America's Death Penalty.

Powerful book.

Um, I mean, it's really just sickening as he...

They certainly are, and we're gonna tell you why and so much more on Planet America's Fireside Chat podcast on the ABC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts.

[upbeat music] We know by now that Donald Trump loves a spectacle, but live streaming an execution by firing squad, will he agree to that? And will Australians be able to watch it? Today, law and capital punishment expert Austin Sarat on the proposed public execution of a former US Army major, botched execution of Christa Pike, and whether Americans still support the death penalty.

I'm Sam Hawley on Gadigal land in Sydney.

This is ABC NewsDaily.

But I think that Donald Trump notwithstanding, that the United States will, if not in my lifetime, certainly in the lifetime of my children, end up joining the European Union or Australia, New Zealand, and other democracies in ending the death penalty.

[gentle music]

Austin Sarat is a professor of law and politics at Amherst College, and the author of Life After Death: What Happens When Someone Survives an Execution.

This episode was produced by Ilaria Brophey and Louise Milen.

We will consider the general human rights questions of capital punishment, and we'll try to understand what's next, not just for Christa Pike, but for capital punishment generally in the country.

Our panel today is Austin Sarat.

He is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College.

He is the author of Lethal Injection and the False Promise of Humane Execution, and he has a forthcoming book due out next spring entitled, Life After Death: Surviving Execution.

There are a lot of unknown questions that we don't have answers to at this point.

I imagine the only thing that will help with those answers is time, that we're gonna have to see how things develop.

Now, Austin Sarat, you've been doing research on this specific question of when the state fails in an execution, sort of what then are the next steps.

And so I guess, first off, since you've been looking at this question, you know, in a number of cases, how common is it that the state attempts an execution and fails? Is this really an, an outlier, or does it happen fairly frequently?

They knew he'd testified under oath that he lacked the skills, and then sent him in again.

According to data published by the Death Penalty Information Center, drawn from legal scholar Austin Sarat's research covering eighteen ninety to twenty ten, lethal injection has a botch rate of seven point one two percent, the highest of any execution method in the dataset.

The electronic chair.

[laughs] Doesn't that sound nice? The electronic chair.