This is an I-Heart podcast.

A warning.

This episode includes violent content, which some listeners might find disturbing.

I'm Michael Phillips, an historian and the author of a history of racism in Dallas called White Metropolis, and the co-author with longtime journalist Betsy Freeoff of the history

of eugenics in Texas called The Purifying Knife. And I'm Stephen Monticelli. I'm an investigative

reporter who specializes in political extremism and far-right internet culture, and I contribute

to outlets like the Texas Observer,

the Barb Blyer, and more. In the last episode, we began exploring the shady history

behind the most popular form of capital punishment in the United States, lethal injection.

We described how one after another, execution by hanging, then the electric chair, and then the

gas chamber was touted as cleanest, quickest, most modern and painless way to put a person to death.

Each method, however, proved more violent and gruesome than previously expected.

In order to prevent a groundswell of opposition to the death penalty, politicians responded by abolishing public executions and the 1970s latched on to lethal injection as the newest, gentlest, and kindest method of state killing.

As discussed in the first episode, the lethal injection protocol was designed by an Oklahoma coroner, Dr. Stephen Crawford,

who once admitted to an interviewer that although he was an expert in dead bodies,

he didn't know how to get him that way.

Authorities turned to Crawford because doctors, who dealt with living bodies,

wanted nothing to do with executions.

So Crawford designed a three drug protocol for executions that he made up

pretty much out of thin air, reasoning that if one deadly drug was good for killing, then three

drugs would be even better. The problem was that the three drugs counteract each other,

and would result in longer executions and in deaths that resembled slow drowning.

...