This Essay is somewhat unusual for a Symposium of this nature honoring the scholarship (and of course the memory) of my former colleague and friend Sherry Colb. I will not engage directly with an article or book Sherry did write, but rather with one that she didn’t. Sherry (and her husband and frequent coauthor Michael Dorf) submitted a book proposal a number of years ago that would have discussed the links between the death penalty and animal slaughter and euthanasia. The working title of the book was The Machinery of Death: Capital Punishment and Animal Slaughter in the U.S. For a variety of reasons, the book never came to fruition. In recent years, I have both through litigation on behalf of death row inmates, and my scholarly interest in the death penalty more broadly, been drawn into the (ongoing) controversy over various methods of execution. For example, South Carolina claimed it could not obtain drugs for execution by lethal injection and thus resurrected the use of the electric chair and adopted, for the first time, the firing squad as an alternative method of dispatching the condemned. During the course of that litigation challenging both methods as unconstitutional, a number of comparisons were drawn by our legal team between the protocols for “humane” animal slaughter and South Carolina’s execution protocols for judicial electrocution and firing squad. But, in other litigation, as well as in several other academic articles, similar comparisons have been made between lethal injection and animal slaughter and euthanasia protocols. In reading Professors Colb and Dorf’s proposal, I was struck by the fact that they had noticed a number of similar themes emerging from the practice of killing human and non-human animals and I will focus on several of those in this Essay.
To read this Article, please click here: On “Death Houses” and “Kill Boxes”: The Death Penalty and Animal Slaughter.
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