In the second episode of the lethal injection series, Steve Monacelli and Michael Phillips interview Dick Reavis, a journalist who witnessed the world’s first execution by lethal injection, that of Charlie Brooks in Texas in 1982. They report on how the lethal injection method was improvised after a Dallas reporter won a temporary court order allowing television stations to broadcast executions. Worried that a televised electrocution might turn the public against the death penalty, Texas politicians instead approved lethal injection. An Oklahoma coroner who admitted he had no expertise in chemistry and knew a lot about dead bodies but not “how to get them that way,” improvised the three-drug protocol eventually used by all death-penalty states, with horrifying results. Then, Monacelli and Phillips interview law professor Corinna Lain, who says that rather than a supposedly painless death, lethal injection is more like a slow drowning.

Sources:

Corinna Barrett Lain, Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection (New York: New York University Press, 2025.)

Dick Reavis, “Charlie Brooks’ Last Words,” Texas Monthly (February 1983.)

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In this first episode of a three-part series on lethal injection in the United States, guest hosts Steve Monacelli and Dr. Michael Phillips describe the futile quest for a “humane” form of execution, from the 1600s to the present day. They explore how each one has turned out to be extremely violent, prompting authorities to move such “gruesome spectacles” out of public view. Finally, they describe how the prospect of a televised execution in the electric chair led to the lethal injection protocol, pioneered by Texas in 1982.

Sources:

Corinna Barrett Lain, Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection (New York: New York University Press, 2025.)

Michael Phillips and Betsy Friauf, The Purifying Knife: The Troubling History of Eugenics in Texas (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2025.)

Austin Sarat, Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014.)

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Garrison talks with a panel of magicians at the Occulture conference in Berlin to discuss digital technomancy vs. traditional magical practices and debate the ability of occultism to shape politics and culture in contemporary society.

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