When Executions Don't Kill: The Stories of Eight People Who Survived Their Date With Death

Authors

• Austin Sarat, Amherst College
• Julia Morgan-Canales, Amherst College
• Aidan Gemme, Amherst College

Abstract

This Article focuses on the eight people who have survived execution attempts in the last 100 years. Some of them faced a second attempt to carry out the sentence. Others escaped that fate only to die in prison; one reached an agreement with the state to allow them to remain in prison for the rest oftheir life, and the fate of another is up in the air.

By examining what went wrong in their executions and the accounts of those events offered by defense lawyers, state officials, and judges, this Article suggests that these executions fall into distinct genres. Each calls on us to make sense of failed executions and the experiences of the people who survive them. Execution survivors highlight the human fallibility and imperfection that undergird the justice system, reveal fissures in the apparatus of sovereignty, and demonstrate the lengths to which governments will go to repair those fissures. The people whose cases are discussed in this Article offer an alternative death penalty story that highlights the states' shortcomings and centers the perspectives of the people it would have us forget.

Disciplines

Administrative Law | Criminal Law | Criminal Procedure | Food and Drug Law | Law | Law and Gender

Recommended Citation

Austin Sarat, Julia Morgan-Canales & Aidan Gemme, When Executions Don't Kill: The Stories of Eight People Who Survived Their Date With Death, 32 Cardozo J. Equal Rts. & Soc. Just. 29 (2025).
Available at: https://larc.cardozo.yu.edu/cardozoersj/vol32/iss1/4