The Brutalizing Effect of State Violence
Rethinking Beccaria in the Age of Nitrogen Gas Executions and Targeted Assassinations at Sea
I just got back from Holman Prison in Atmore, Alabama, where the execution chamber is located. The state of Alabama has begun using nitrogen gas asphyxiation regularly as their method of execution. Based on the media reports, the executioners place a gas mask over the prisoner’s face and force nitrogen in, eliminating all the oxygen and causing air hunger—a panic fight-or-flight reaction to the lack of oxygen. It is the newest method of execution, first used by the state of Alabama in January 2024. It has now been used six times in Alabama and once in Louisiana. Other states like Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Arkansas have also adopted it for use.
I’ve been following the nitrogen gas executions in Alabama closely because I represent a man on death row, David Wilson, who is challenging the constitutionality of the new gas protocol. (There is information regarding his legal challenge to gas executions online here.) As a result, I have been studying each one of the executions carefully—collecting the media accounts, comparing them, finding the patterns. I was just at Holman Prison yesterday to conduct an inspection, but I am under a protective order, so I cannot discuss anything that I saw or did. Here, I will refer only to the media accounts that are in the news and publicly available.
Nitrogen gas executions, it turns out, are terrifying ordeals for the man being executed. The Alabama Attorney General believed that nitrogen gas would render prisoners unconscious in a matter of seconds and dead in a matter of minutes; but it turns out, the record so far demonstrates that the prisoners remain conscious and thrashing against the gurney straps for anywhere between two to seven minutes, followed by another five to eight minutes of agonal breathing. The air hunger in those first minutes appears to be excruciatingly distressing.
The first gas execution in Alabama tipped me off that things were not going as planned. I had been deeply concerned about the new method beforehand and wrote an op-ed about it in the New York Times. I dreaded the evening of the first execution and soon learned that my worst fears had been realized. The victim’s son, Mike Sennett, came out of that first execution traumatized and told the media: “With all that struggling and jerking and trying to get off that table, more or less, it’s just something I don’t ever want to see again.” Marty Roney of the Montgomery Advertiser reported that the prisoner, Kenneth Eugene Smith, “appeared to convulse and shake vigorously for about four minutes after the nitrogen gas apparently began flowing through his full-face mask in Alabama’s death chamber. It was another two to three minutes before he appeared to lose consciousness, all while gasping for air to the extent that the gurney shook several times.”
My amended complaint in David Wilson’s case chronicles all the horrors that have occurred during the first four nitrogen gas executions. The last execution, conducted on September 25, 2025, involved a man, Geoffrey West, who was a volunteer. He had been on death row since the late nineties, convicted for the 1997 robbery-murder of a gas station attendant, Margaret Parrish Berry. He had dropped his appeals.
His execution was a tragedy for other reasons as well. The son of his victim, Will Berry, who was eleven years old when his mother died, had gone through a self-transformation and had come to forgive Mr. West. Mr. Berry pleaded with the Alabama Governor, Kay Ivey, to spare Mr. West’s life, spoke out publicly against the execution, asked to meet in person with Mr. West to tell him that he forgave him—but was ignored and refused throughout. “I don’t want Alabama to execute my mother’s killer,” he wrote. “I don’t want revenge in my name.”
In any event, Mr. West was not resisting his execution in any way and opted into the nitrogen gas method. He was asking to be put to death. He was engaged in state-assisted suicide. And yet, the ordeal was as horrific as the gas executions before him. According to media accounts—media who are chosen by the Alabama Department of Corrections and statutorily required to attend and report faithfully on the executions, in effect to be the public’s eye—Mr. West struggled to breath for minutes, his body shaking and tensing against the restraints, foam coming out of his mouth. According to Kim Chandler at the Associated Press, “West’s eyes were open as he appeared to gulp and struggle for breath during the first two minutes. His head rocked from side to side, his left fist curled up and he appeared to slightly foam at the mouth.”
Executions are supposed to kill people in a matter of seconds. A hanging snaps the brain stem and immediately causes paralysis and unconsciousness. A firing squad aims at the heart and causes near instantaneous death. Other methods that were developed over the centuries, from the guillotine to the electric chair, were specifically designed to cause immediate death. But the new nitrogen gas method of execution leaves prisoners gasping for air and violently struggling against the straps of the gurney for as much as seven minutes—which, you can just imagine if you watch a clock for that long, is an inordinate amount of time to be in distress.
Brutalizing Effects
What I want to focus on here, though, is the brutalizing effect of these nitrogen gas executions, and more generally, of the state violence that our government metes out on our behalf, in our names. I am thinking as well of the U.S. Navy summarily executing Venezuelan citizens who are suspected of being drug couriers and targeted for assassination by President Donald Trump—I wrote about that last week. There now have been four such attacks on motorboats in international waters, resulting in the killing of 21 people.
How does it affect us to witness and experience so much killing of civilians so directly in our name? So much supposedly justified killing? In Alabama, in the Caribbean, these are American citizens working for the department of corrections or U.S. military doing the killing. It is being done explicitly on our behalf. We read about it in the papers and on our screens, we watch the videos of the boats getting hit and exploding, we hear about the nitrogen executions on TV, we experience the violence almost first hand. President Trump repeatedly posts videos on social media of the live killings of people on motorboats off the Venezuelan coast. How does it affect us?
During the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, philosophers began to speak out against the “brutalizing effects” of torture, corporal punishments, and public executions. The most famous Enlightenment thinker on punishment, the young Italian Cesare Beccaria, argued that the brutalizing effects of these practices outweighed any deterrent effect that they might have had on crime.
[Doctor Guillotin presenting a model of the Guillotine to the French Assembly]
Beccaria was only twenty-five when, in 1764, he published his landmark book, On Crimes and Punishments, in which he famously argued against capital punishment. He was one of the first Enlightenment abolitionists. He was part of a small group of Italian Enlightenment thinkers, known as the Fisticuffs because they got into so many arguments that would turn into brawls. Others included Count Pietro Verri and his brother, Alessandro Verri—some still today argue that the resulting book was a collective effort. On Crimes and Punishments became famous and reached a wide audience because Voltaire—who saw eye-to-eye with Beccaria on the inhumanity of those punishments and torture—had the little volume translated into French and wrote a preface to the French edition.
Beccaria’s argument was precocious. He argued that capital punishment had a brutalizing effect on society “because of the example of savagery it gives to men.” Although he was an economist, and actually published one the first law-and-economics papers on punishment also in 1764 (calculating optimal fines in the context of economic tariffs and contraband), he did not conduct empirical studies to assess and compare the brutalizing and deterrent effects of those cruel public executions—like the one that opens Foucault’s masterpiece, Discipline and Punish. You will recall, of course, the brutal opening pages of Foucault’s book describing the horrific quartering and burning of Damiens in 1757, who attempted a regicide of Louis XV.
Economists in the late twentieth century did conduct extensive research on the deterrent effects of capital punishment, and so in that limited context tested the deterrence hypothesis against the brutalizing effects. John Donohue at Stanford University and Justin Wolfers at the University of Michigan ran a meta-analysis of the most reliable studies and concluded that they were unable to establish any deterrent effect to executions. The scientific debate ultimately petered out and it is fair to say that today, there is no good evidence of a deterrent effect to capital punishment. In fact, if you look at the comparison of the U.S. and Canadian experience with the death penalty, it seems overwhelmingly convincing, to me at least, that there is no such effect.
But I do not believe that we, in the academy, or others more broadly, have properly studied the brutalizing effect of state violence more broadly—the hypothesis that Beccaria had identified, not limited to the death penalty, but encompassing other forms of state violence, like torture, indefinite detention, or targeted assassinations. And it strikes me that we may be missing something important as a result.
I am not suggesting there is no research. There has been innovative work done in the context of exposure to police killings and resulting trauma, or to state violence during the Arab Spring. And my colleague and friend, Paul Butler at Georgetown, has written about state violence more broadly and its detrimental effects.
But I think it is time to reconsider Beccaria’s thesis of a brutalizing effect. Our government engages in horrific forms of violence in our names. And we are exposed to it constantly—most recently, with traumatizing videos of masked ICE agents kidnapping people off the streets and placing them in unmarked cars. How does that effect our collective psyche and our inclinations to act?
Scholars and journalists have explored the material ways in which these forms of justified violence come home to roost: how soldiers trained in these practices bring them home when they reenter civilian life; or how the military equipment finds its way in local police departments through Department of Defense procurement programs. I’ve spent years documenting those material pathways, culminating in a book titled The Counterrevolution: How Our Governement Went to War Against Its Own Citizens. And the evidence of material effects keeps pouring in.
Jennifer Gonnerman describes, in chilling detail, how the state violence administered in New York prisons returns home with the corrections officers. In an article that just came out yesterday in the New Yorker, “A Year of Convulsions in New York’s Prisons,” Gonnerman interviews a former corrections officer who describes how his coworkers “were going home and lashing out at their kids, and they were lashing out at their wives.” The problem, he explained, is that “Everybody hates everybody in there… Your life revolves around hate from every side.”
Matthieu Aikins, in an article titled “They Celebrated Vigilante Justice on the Battlefield. Then They Brought It Home,” in this week’s New York Times Magazine, shows how a culture of state violence and vigilante justice can seep back into the fabric of American society—or how, as some of the Green Berets that he interviewed put it, “misconduct at home was a result of commanders tolerating rule-breaking by soldiers for the sake of the mission.” Anthony Aguilar, one of his informants, a retired lieutenant colonel, explained that “You can’t accept that type of behavior in one environment and then be shocked when it carries over in terms of how that individual behaves in another.”
These are material pathways. But there may also be psychic pathways—and it’s those that I would like to spotlight: the way in which the example of killing people for their wrongful acts or targeting them for summary execution may get normalized as the right way to deal with problems more generally. And how troubling that may be, in Beccaria’s words, “because of the example of savagery it gives to men.”
Beccaria, it seems, was way ahead of us, back in 1764, when he worried about what those practices would do to us. How they would transform our ways of thinking and feeling. He was only 25 years old at the time—a Gen Z by our standards today. Perhaps he had special insight into it because he was young. Perhaps he had not yet internalized those forms of state violence. I hope we come to his realizations before it is too late.