Tennessee’s attempt to proceed with Christa Pike’s execution last week ended in failure, as an ambulance carried the condemned woman to a Nashville hospital where she became a patient in dire need of life-saving intervention. If Pike pulls through after two flawed administrations of pentobarbital—leaving her unconscious and unable to breathe on her own—she might one day traverse that path in the opposite direction when she is deemed fit to be put to death.
That extraordinary incident highlights the troubling consequences of trying to mask the stark brutality of capital punishment by draping it in medical trappings. While most Americans support carrying out executions for murderers like Pike, the method they favor signals a reluctance to confront what that approach actually entails.
In the previous year, Gallup found that 52 percent of Americans favored the death penalty, a drop of 28 percentage points from its high point in 1994. Across several surveys, the public largely regards lethal injection, first adopted by Oklahoma in 1977, as the “most humane” method of execution, preferred over firing squads, hanging, the electric chair, and the gas chamber.
The Supreme Court endorsed that perception in 2008 by upholding Kentucky’s three-drug execution protocol, which critics described as dubious and unnecessarily elaborate. By that time, thirty-six states had adopted lethal injection, a shift Chief Justice John Roberts hailed as the product of an “earnest desire to provide for a progressively more humane manner of death.”
Roberts characterized lethal injection as “more humane” than “the firing squad, hanging, the electric chair, and the gas chamber.” Yet while this method may appear less crude than the older options, appearances can be deceiving.
As Fordham University law professor Deborah Denno noted shortly before that ruling, executions that are less painful to watch do not necessarily hurt less. “To me,” Denno told The New York Times, “the firing squad is the most humane,” even though it is often perceived as the most brutal.
Since then, the trend in many death-penalty states has been toward a single-drug protocol, typically involving a lethal dose of pentobarbital. But Pike’s botched attempt demonstrates that the move away from three drugs has not eliminated the difficulties of locating a usable vein and ensuring the drug reaches the bloodstream rather than surrounding tissue—a challenge that can be complicated by preexisting medical issues.
Pike’s aborted lethal injection marked the second such failure in Tennessee this year and prompted Gov. Bill Lee to pause executions pending a clearer understanding of what went wrong. Yet the tragedy described by Lee last week is merely the latest illustration of a problem that has persisted for more than four decades: prolonged injections that reveal the distressing signs of needless suffering the method is supposed to prevent.
Injectable death-inducing drugs are hard to come by because pharmaceutical companies are reluctant to supply them, and they can be extraordinarily costly, with a dose of pentobarbital running as high as $300,000. Moreover, the drug’s shelf life is short, degrading after about 90 days, which means much of the money may be wasted if the drug sits unused.
For these reasons, lawmakers are reevaluating the appeal of firing squads, which five states currently permit under certain circumstances. Condemned inmates themselves see potential benefits: last year in South Carolina, three inmates chose the firing squad over lethal injection.
The logic is not hard to discern. A review of cases from 1890 through 2010 by the Death Penalty Information Center found that lethal injection had the highest incidence of botched executions—about 7 percent—compared with 5 percent for lethal gas, 3 percent for hanging, and 2 percent for electrocution. The firing squad carried a botch rate of zero percent.
That evidence underscores a point that states overlooked in their haste to adopt lethal injection: making executions look more palatable does not automatically make them faster or more reliable. The pursuit of “more humane” methods, ostensibly aimed at reducing the condemned’s suffering, ends up serving primarily to ease the public’s discomfort with the act of killing.
© Copyright 2026 by Creators Syndicate Inc.
