Book Review: The Volunteer

Quick Information at a glance:

• ISBN: 9781668033012
• Author: Gianna Toboni
• Pages: 320
• While I did copy this review on my Librarything profile, please consider this the official review.

The Book, My thoughts, and is it a good read.

“The Volunteer” is a sobering book about the capital punishment machine in America, the attempts to whitewash it in the form of lethal injections, the fight between departments of corrections and the anti-capital groups trying to get restrictions on how the drugs can be used in correctional settings, and the story of Scott Dozier – a former death row inmate in Nevada who tried to force the state to execute him – as told by Gianna Tobini, a Vice reporter.

As someone who’s spent a bit of time working on death penalty cases (though in a pretty limited role) and as someone who has a bit of a morbid curiosity on the generalities of the death penalty, the entire book itself is well written: the only part of Tobini’s book that really bugged me was her claim that Tennessee’s electric chair was operated by a simple switch. In reality, the control device used by the state was made by Fred Leuchter yes, that Fred Leuchter – who made a business out of selling execution systems to states. He even had a reputation for shaking them down a bit, offering to testify against their methods if they didn’t hire him. The documentary Mr. Death, does a great job digging into his sketchy (at best) qualifications and the weird, uncomfortable role he played in the death penalty world. I think Mr. Dozier’s larger-than-life personality (and crimes) are a large part of the story itself, but Tobini does a great job of arranging her book to tell the story behind lethal injection’s origins, the struggle between the states and the federal government around getting drugs to execute the inmates on death row, and the fight to keep those drugs out of state’s hands by the anti-death penalty groups as well as the drug manufactures themselves while including the reality behind why those inmates (including Dozier) are on Death row.

If you like true crime novels, are interested in the death penalty and the politics behind it (having a state rep say that the more he interacts with the ineptitude with the government, the less certain he is about the death penalty is a harrowing quote about the process and how it’s applied), or are just curious about the business of how and why the states execute inmates, this book should be on your short list of items to read.