This is an I-Heart podcast.

CallZone Media.

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, a journalist in Dallas who specializes covering political extremism and far-right internet culture for

publications like the Texas Observer, the barbed wire, and others.

On December 7, 1982, the state of Texas made history in a particularly grim way.

It became the first government anywhere in the world to put a prisoner to death by lethal injection.

This innovation was meant to make the grisly business of executing murderers swift and humane.

More accurately, it was meant to convince the witnesses of executions, and by extension the general public,

that what they were watching didn't violate the United States

Constitution's Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. In fact, lethal injection is based

on junk science. And those who die that way may actually suffer more and over a longer time

than prisoners who were executed by electric chairs six decades ago.

In many ways, lethal injection is a con game designed to hide from the public that their government

is torturing prisoners to death. As the University of Richmond law professor, Perinna Lane,

the author of recently published book, Secrets of the Killing State,

The Untold Story of Lethal Injection, told us...

What I've come to conclude is that lethal injection only does one thing well.

Only one.

...