There has been plenty of fallout from the two failed attempts to put to death a Tennessee prisoner by lethal injection. The state’s corrections commissioner resigned, and the governor has put a halt to executions through the end of the year to find out what went wrong.
Most likely, efforts to carry out the sentence given to 50-year-old Christa Pike are heavily in the news because it’s rare that a woman is executed in the United States. In 1995, Pike was 19 when she and her boyfriend killed another young woman who Pike believed was a romantic rival. The circumstances were severe enough that she was sentenced to death.
A bit of research indicates that failed or inefficient executions are more common than most of us realize, even in the United States of the 21st century, when you would think there’s been enough experience with the death penalty to deliver it quickly and humanely.
After the failed efforts to execute Pike, the USA Today website cited an analysis by the non-profit Death Penalty Information Center, which reported there have been at least 64 “botched executions” since 1982, with the vast majority of them involving lethal injections.
Pike’s was not even the first one that failed this year. It was not even the first failed execution this year in Tennessee.
A Wikipedia page titled “List of botched executions” goes back centuries, and includes the beheading of Mary Queen of Scots in 1581, because it took the executioner three strikes to complete his task.
The page reported that earlier this year, the medical team carrying out the sentence of a Memphis man convicted of three murders found a vein for the primary intravenous line, but could not find a backup vein and called off the execution. The prisoner received a one-year reprieve from the governor.
The page lists six other cases since 2020. In 2022, for example, it took Alabama three hours to execute a prisoner by lethal injection because they could not find suitable veins. That same year, also in Alabama, a medical team spent two hours trying to solve the same problem. The prisoner was put to death two years later by a procedure called nitrogen hypoxia, a form of asphyxiation.
Many people would have no problem with executions that don’t go smoothly or without pain. A condemned person’s victim obviously suffered, the thinking goes, so maybe we should let the killer know what that feels like as they leave this world.
The thirst for vengeance is understandable. But we are a better society than that. Executions should be carried out humanely. They can never repair the damage that was caused. And our mothers always reminded us that two wrongs don’t make a right.
There are at least three problems with lethal injection executions. A history of drug use and other medical issues can make it hard to find veins through which to deliver the injection. Medical teams performing the execution sometimes are not skilled at what they’re doing. And it’s getting harder to obtain lethal drugs from pharmaceutical companies, which don’t want their products used to kill people.
Which leads to the question of what other options are available. A story by The Associated Press listed nitrogen hypoxia or the use of other lethal gases, or a firing squad. Two methods that once were common, electrocution and hanging, are today rarely used.
The death penalty is likely to remain part of our justice system. It’s imperative to develop a method of execution that is reliable and quick.
