Medical Knowledge Against Medicalized Killing: Contemporary Forensic Counter-Expertise on US Executions by Lethal Injection

• In Event: Forensic Evidence And Expertise In Local, National And Global Contexts - III

Abstract

Drawing on the study of legal documents and on a series of interviews, this communication will study the social production and activity of a specific group of medical experts: physicians or scholars in anesthesiology who got involved in critical expertise over the practice of penal executions by lethal injection in the USA since the early 2000s, and who now regularly appear in the media and before court to challenge the alleged “humanity” of this execution method.
The presentation will first adopt a situated, non-essentialist perspective on expertise to describe the making of this group of “improbable experts”, whose main field of study is external to forensic science, but who unexpectedly engage in counter-forensic practices and strategies. This group is a small and coherent one – a dozen professionals – with connections to a global network of lawyers and anti-death penalty activists that will be closely analyzed. Second, it will focus on the technicality of the counter-expertise these specialists produce: to challenge the narratives of “correctional” experts who describe lethal injections as painless, they draw on a range of methods including the analysis of injection protocols, of blood samples collected on executed inmates, and the autopsies of their bodies. The communication will examine the experts’ struggle to perform these analyses in closed-in correctional realms, and the different forms of scientific “truth” they produce on the executed body and its reactions. Finally, the presentation will examine the legal consequences of this expertise, as it moves from public statements to testimonies before court.

Author

• Nicolas Fischer, CESDIP, University of Versailles St Quentin