Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America's Death Penalty. By Austin Sarat. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2014. 288 pp. $24.00 cloth.

Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America's Death Penalty. By Austin Sarat. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2014. 288 pp. $24.00 cloth.The marketing team at Stanford University Press could not have picked a more grimly appropriate release date for Austin Sarat's latest book, Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America's Death Penalty. In April of 2014, on the eve of the book's publication, the state of Oklahoma botched the execution by lethal injection of Clayton D. Lockett. After being declared unconscious, Lockett began writhing and attempted to sit up. Forty-three minutes after the execution began and seven minutes after officials tried to abort it, he died of a heart attack. On editorial pages across the world, writers decried the horror of what appeared to be a torturous, lingering death.But such deaths, Sarat shows in his history of executions gone wrong, have been anything but anomalous in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Working with four collaborators-Katherine Blumstein, Aubrey Jones, Heather Richard, and Madeline Sprung-Keyser-Sarat used newspapers to survey 8,776 executions from 1900 to 2010. His sobering finding: 3 percent of all executions since 1900 have been botched. Over 8.5 percent have been botched since 1980: Americans have gotten worse, not better, at executing offenders.The book is sure to become an essential resource for scholars wishing to pursue the important theoretical and empirical questions botched executions raise about the practice of capital punishment in the United States. Beyond giving us an unprecedented understanding of the frequency and nature of botched executions (an appendix provides short summaries of each of the 276 botched executions Sarat and his collaborators found), Gruesome Spectacles compellingly situates them in a larger history of the American death penalty. In four chapters dedicated to each mode of execution (hanging, electricity, lethal gas, and lethal injection), Sarat charts cycles of reform and disillusionment: from 1890 to 2010, a dark idealism persisted as elites turned from one technology of death to another, each time with the hope that they had finally found a way to kill painlessly and instantaneously. Perfect sovereign control over life and death was always on the horizon.Journalists oddly enabled this bizarre optimism. When ropes decapitated the condemned, electric chairs lit them on fire, or lethal gas left made them retch, newspapers described the events as "unavoidable misfortunes rather than as symptoms of injustices crying out for rectification" (p. 175). Reporters would contort their prose when describing botched executions, using the passive voice to avoid assigning blame to any one person for burning flesh or heaving chests. And when they did assign a cause, it would often be superhuman, as when one reporter blamed a botched hanging on a morning rain that had stretched the rope. This "misfortune narrative," Sarat compellingly argues, explains why "throughout the twentieth century botched executions played only a minor role in efforts to end the death penalty" (p. 6).Theoretically and empirically rich, Gruesome Spectacles should inspire further inquiries into the meaning and history of botched executions, a topic that has until now received scant attention from scholars. Indeed, the newspaper discourse Sarat critically examines is so fertile that one can imagine other interpretations of them beyond the one he offers here. When the state of New York took five shocks and eight minutes to kill Antonio Ferraro in 1900, for instance, one paper informed readers that he was "of a brutish nature" and that "men of that stamp offer more resistance to the electric current" (quoted on p. …