Dead to Rights
This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.
This much is undisputed: In 1994, Joe Nathan James Jr. murdered Faith Hall, a mother of two he had formerly dated; in 1999, he was sentenced to death in Jefferson County, Alabama; and he was executed on July 28, 2022. Whether James ought to have been killed was and is, by contrast, deeply disputed—Hall’s family pleaded that their mercy should spare him, and the state government acted against their wishes. Also disputed is the matter of how, exactly, the Alabama Department of Corrections took James’s life. Or it was in my mind, at least, until I saw what they had done to him, engraved in his skin.
A little over a week ago, James’s body lay on a bloody shroud draped over an exam table in an Alabama morgue scarcely large enough to accommodate the three men studying the corpse. He had been dead for several days, but there was still time to discover what exactly had happened to him during the roughly three-hour period it took to—in the Department of Corrections’ telling—establish access to a vein so an execution team could deliver the lethal injection of drugs that would kill him. Despite the long delay and an unnaturally short execution, the Department of Corrections had assured media witnesses gathered to observe James’s death that “nothing out of the ordinary” had happened in the course of killing the 50-year-old. It was suspicion of that claim that led to this private autopsy.
By the time I arrived at the morgue where Joel Zivot, an associate professor of anesthesiology and surgery at Emory University and a lethal-injection opponent, had agreed to join a local independent pathologist named Boris Datnow and his assistant, Jay Glass, James’s body had undergone days of postmortem swelling in cool storage. Datnow would later caution me about the difficulty of our inquiry—the edema had diminished our chances of locating punctures left by needles during the execution—though my initial impression of James was of someone whose hands and wrists had been burst by needles, in every place one can bend or flex. That and the carnage farther up one arm
