This is the inside story of sanctioned killing in America as seen by the men who design the machinery of execution and by those who are to be executed. For many months Steven Trombley immersed himself in the community of the condemned. This book is based on more than 400 hours of interviews with executioners, with the inventor of the machines of execution, with the condemned themselves, and offers an account of the author's own experience as witness to two executions. It is a journey into the death chambers of the 37 states of the US that still have them, as well as a condemnation of a system which, the author argues, so easily dehumanizes those who are charged with carrying out the will of the people.