Without Howling, Without Squirming

Abstract

This chapter explores the drive to make execution painless for the condemned and easy for executioners and witnesses. When the state of North Carolina took responsibility for capital punishment from county sheriffs, it introduced the electric chair. When that failed to produce a swift and spectacle-free death, the state constructed a gas chamber. The search for a reliable, quiet, and painless method of execution sapped most of the activist energy around the death penalty, transforming its form but never its function.