Corinna Barrett Lain

Corinna Barrett Lain (Law ’96) published Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection (NYU Press 2025). Based on seven years of deep research, this exposé takes readers into the notoriously secretive world of American executions, using shocking revelations about lethal injection to shine a light on the American death penalty more broadly. The story of lethal injection is a story of state law-breaking and cover-ups, fake science and torturous drugs, gross incompetence by woefully inept executioners, and a stunning indifference to the way prisoners die at the hands of the state. She examines all the ways that the state cannot be trusted with the power to take life, and all the ways it has tried to cover that up.

Corinna is the S.D. Roberts & Sandra Moore professor of law at the University of Richmond School of Law.