Who are the death row executioners?
Disgraced doctors, suspended nurses and drunk drivers
These are just the US executioners we know. But they are a chilling indication of the executioners we don’t know.
Being an executioner is not the sort of job that gets posted in a local wanted ad. Kids don’t dream about being an executioner when they grow up, and people don’t go to school for it. So how does one become a death row executioner in the US, and who are the people doing it?
This was the question I couldn’t help but ask when I began a book project on lethal injection back in 2018. I’m a death penalty researcher, and I was trying to figure out why states are so breathtakingly bad at a procedure that we use on cats and dogs every day. Part of the riddle was who is performing these executions.
Seven years later – and with the Trump administration promising more executions to come – I have an answer, sort of.
Corinna Barrett Lain is the S. D. Roberts & Sandra Moore Professor of Law at the University of Richmond School of Law and the author of Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection (NYU Press, 2025).