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The Scholars' CircleAuthor: The Scholars' Circle
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Scholars’ Circle – Death Penalty, a Case of Cruel and Unnecessary Punishment by the State – October 11, 2026
Monday, 12 October, 2026
On September 30, 2026, the state of Tennessee attempted to execute Christa Pike. She had been convicted of murder and sentenced to death in 1996. The state failed to execute her. This is not the first time in 2026 that the state failed in an execution. The subsequent reporting of how the execution was carried out and the pain and suffering that Ms Pike experienced has raised several issues. These include whether the method of execution is a violation of the 8th Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. And whether the execution violated the Convention against Torture, to which the US is a party. And most importantly it raises the general human rights issues around capital punishment. So on today’s show we will explore the issues around the method of execution known as lethal injection. We will consider the general human rights questions of capital punishment. And we will try to understand whats next, not just for Christa Pike, but for capital punishment generally in the country. [ dur: 58mins. ] Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence & Political Science at Amherst College. He is the author of Lethal Injection and the False Promise of Humane Execution and the forthcoming book Life After Death: Surviving Execution. Sandra Babcock is Clinical Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide at Cornell Law School. “The Lethal Consequences of Gender Bias in the Application of the Death Penalty,” 45 Amicus Journal 4 and co-author of Defending Women and Transgender Persons Facing Extreme Sentences: A Practical Guide, with Nathalie Greenfield, Gabriela Markolovic, and Jessica Sutton. Frank R. Baumgartner is Richard J. Richardson Distinguished Professor of Political Science at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the co-author of The Decline of the Death Penalty and the Discovery of Innocence and Deadly Justice: A Statistical Portrait of the Death Penalty. Jenny-Brooke Condon is Professor of Law in the Center for Social Justice at Seton Hall Law School. She directs the Equal Justice Clinic. She is the author of When Cruelty is the Point: Constitutional Restraints and Remedies for Family Separation and Denialism and the Death Penalty. This program is produced by Doug Becker, Maria Armoudian, Ankine Aghassian, Anna Lapin and Sudd Dongre. Politics and Activism, Human Rights, Prison, Courts, punishment, death penalty, capital crimes
