Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law

Volume

23

Publication Date

2026

Keywords

executions, death penalty

Abstract

Since the modern death penalty era, this country’s six execution methods have become crueler over time. This article details the execution procedures adopted across death penalty states up to the end of 2025, analyzing their societal and cultural underpinnings and explaining how they were implemented, including their shared flaws, unscientific origins and protocols, and reliance on untrained, unqualified, or unknown executioners. While legislatures and courts claim that states move from one technique to the next to enhance greater humaneness, history shows that such switches are primarily propelled by constitutional challenges to a state’s particular technique. In theory, rendering a state’s execution method unconstitutional could threaten the death penalty’s very existence, hence one reason states hold tight to a problematic method for decades. Some states go back in time by adopting older methods (such as electrocution or the firing squad). In contrast, other states experiment with wholly new, untested methods (for example, nitrogen hypoxia). This article ends by focusing on this country’s “perfect storm” of recent executions and their divorce from current cultural norms, a development juxtaposed with the resurgence of the firing squad, one of this country’s oldest and most entrenched execution methods. A confluence of forces, especially at the start of 2025, has bypassed concerns about the humaneness of executions and focused nearly exclusively on their mere perpetuation. On all levels, the U.S. experiment with the death penalty has surged, resulting in botched execution outcomes that are worse than they ever have been, especially in light of today’s push to pursue the latest and most perfect technological advances.

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