What happens when states combine ineptitude with the death penalty

Call it executive dysfunction. Since 2021 American states have executed 148 convicted criminals. Of that number, according to data gathered from news reports by the Death Penalty Information Centre, an advocacy charity, 11 were botched, with many of the condemned left writhing in pain on gurneys for 30 minutes or more. Of these, four did not succeed in bringing about death at all.

Photograph: Reuters (Photograph: Reuters)Add to that grim tally one more. On September 30th the state of Tennessee administered two supposedly lethal doses of pentobarbital, a powerful sedative, to Christa Pike, a 50-year-old woman convicted of murdering a classmate decades ago. And yet Ms Pike did not die. Eventually she was taken to hospital, where she is in critical condition.

Ms Pike’s execution was controversial even before it failed. An hour before it was due to begin, a federal appeals court ruled the punishment should be delayed to consider arguments that Ms Pike, who was 18 at the time of the murder, should be spared because of her experience of sexual abuse. The Supreme Court then ruled, without giving its reasons, that the execution could go ahead.

Beyond the particulars of her case, however, Ms Pike’s failed execution points to a rising challenge. Among other members of the OECD, a club of rich countries, only Japan still executes people regularly. Yet even as America allows the death penalty, it bars punishment that is “cruel and unusual”, as laid out in the constitution’s Eighth Amendment. The rising number of mishandled executions suggests those standards may be incompatible.

Since at least the time of Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, governments have sought cleaner, quicker and more reliable ways to kill criminals. Dissatisfied with hanging, in the late 19th century American states began to adopt the electric chair. In the 1970s, after the Supreme Court lifted its own short-lived moratorium on capital punishment, lethal injection became common. But death by intravenous poison is proving to be hardly more reliable than hanging or electrocution were.

Problems arise for a variety of reasons, from an inability to find a useable vein in which to inject drugs to the unreliability of the drugs themselves—it has been 15 years since pharmaceutical companies, under pressure from European regulators, stopped supplying lethal drugs to American executioners. Many are carried out by people with no medical background, because doctors and nurses take seriously their oath to do no harm. Thanks to new impetus from Republican governors, last year 47 Americans were put to death, the highest figure in over 15 years. And yet the administration of lethal injection continues to be mishandled.

Why stick with needles? In 2015 Utah brought back the firing squad. Since then Idaho, South Carolina and in April, the federal government, have followed. After a legal battle South Carolina in 2024 reintroduced the use of the electric chair. A handful of other states are experimenting with gas chambers, asphyxiating prisoners with nitrogen or poisoning them with cyanide gas.

Yet these methods are prone to gruesome flubs, too. In June the Supreme Court blocked Alabama from using its gas chamber, after some condemned criminals spent minutes gasping for air. In South Carolina last year all three members of a firing squad missed their target’s heart.

And so lethal injection remains the main method of death, accounting for around nine in ten executions. Noticeably, botched executions are rare in the two states, Texas and Florida, which kill most people; apparently having experience, as in most other jobs, makes an executioner more effective. Last year Florida killed 19 people, more than in any year since the federal moratorium was lifted, and has generated no reports of mishandling.

If states double down on injections, they may eventually gain some macabre expertise. However, most criminals recently put to death were convicted decades ago, and public support for capital punishment may shift. Polling by Gallup suggests that only a slim majority of Americans still support the death penalty. And when they are tasked with the responsibility of sentencing, even fewer support it. The annual number of new death sentences issued has fallen by over 90% since the 1990s; last year, there were just 23. Most juries in capital cases choose life instead.