At about 6 p.m. last night, the Supreme Court lifted a temporary stay placed on the execution of Christa Pike, a Tennessee woman who was found guilty of joining two accomplices in murdering a classmate in 1995, when Pike was 18 years old. Roughly an hour and a half later, Pike, who has spent 30 years on death row, was strapped to a gurney in Tennessee’s death chamber for lethal injection. When the execution staff began administering the barbiturate pentobarbital, the single drug the state uses in such executions, Pike turned to her spiritual adviser and mentioned a burning sensation. Time passed, but Pike remained conscious and said that her arm felt like it was “about to burst open.” Perhaps aware that their attempt to kill Pike was not going as planned, prison officials closed the curtains on the witness observation window at 7:46 p.m., reopened them minutes later, then closed them for good at 8:05 p.m.
Pike is not the first prisoner to suffer a horrifically botched execution in Tennessee this year. In May, prison officials in Nashville similarly bungled the killing of Tony Carruthers, who was pierced with needles and sliced open with a scalpel before the execution was called off. These stories are part of a broader pattern of failed executions in recent years. In 2022, when I began investigating disastrous lethal-injection attempts in Alabama, the Death Penalty Information Center reported that 35 percent of the year’s total executions had been botched. In the 44 years that America has carried out lethal injections, the evidence has repeatedly revealed that the method is scientifically unsound, frequently torturous, and woefully unreliable.
Given the odds of a botched procedure, subjecting prisoners to lethal injections can no longer be justified as reasonable. Pike’s story alone destroys the presumption that lethal injections are a more humane and clinical alternative to the electric chair or gas chamber. And the method’s record is only getting worse with time.
[From the July 2025 issue: Inside America’s death chambers]
Last night, after the prison staff closed the curtains for the first time and reopened them minutes later, Pike seemed to be breathing hard and in respiratory distress. As the minutes passed, her visible symptoms worsened: Her body contorted, and she uttered choking, grunting sounds. Tennessee’s lethal-injection protocol allowed staff to administer a backup dose of pentobarbital, but Pike continued to show signs of life, and the staff once again closed the curtain. Yet witnesses could hear Pike’s ragged breathing via the audio feed from the execution chamber. Because Tennessee law permits no more than two doses of pentobarbital, her lawyers scrambled to file emergency motions arguing that efforts to kill her must cease so that she could get medical attention. The execution formally concluded just before 9 p.m., and Pike was transferred to an off-site hospital for treatment.
Pike’s story is harrowing but not unique. In her recent paper “Why Are Executions Becoming Crueler?,” Deborah Denno, a law professor at Fordham University, writes that recent cases of botched injections “failed for all the same reasons they have faltered since this country’s first lethal injection execution four decades ago: executioner incompetence, inappropriate use of torturous drugs, and defects in lethal injection protocols, among a host of other factors.”
Qualified medical personnel generally do not want to be involved with lethal injections. This is in part because major medical institutions, such as the American Medical Association, explicitly bar participation in executions, which violates the Hippocratic oath to do no harm. Playing a role in state-sanctioned murder has grown still harder to justify as heinous examples of botched executions accrue. Although the identities of executioners are concealed by state secrecy laws, the potential for discovery is presumably unwelcome to anyone tasked with healing. The absence of skilled medical personnel has contributed to dire mishaps in several states, including Tennessee: In Carruthers’s case, a physician attempted to set a more complicated central intravenous line despite the fact that he had not done so in decades—resulting in a bloody failure. Tennessee refused to confirm or deny whether the same doctor would preside over Pike’s execution.
[Elizabeth Bruenig: What happened to Tony Carruthers is horrifying]
The absence of experienced and qualified medical staff means that lethal-injection attempts frequently fail to establish access to prisoners’ veins. This appears to have happened in Pike’s case, based on her complaints at the time. When IV lines are set poorly, because of either a prisoner’s unique physiology (Pike, for instance, has thrombocytosis, a platelet disorder that causes increased blood clotting) or simple incompetence, prisoners’ veins can rupture, spilling blood and poison into the surrounding tissue, which can cause the burning Pike described.
Pike’s veins may have been so compromised that very little pentobarbital may have made it into her bloodstream. Another equally plausible reason why the execution failed is that the drug was expired or contaminated, a problem that has plagued other states. Texas, for instance, has long extended the use-by dates on its stock of pentobarbital, and has carried out executions with expired drugs. As recently as 2022, Tennessee had failed to properly test its lethal-injection drugs for the presence of bacterial endotoxins, which can trigger severe physiological distress. Expiration and contamination can both negatively affect executions, either by creating intolerable pain at injection sites or by prompting multiple injections because of decreased potency. And because pharmaceutical manufacturers have largely sought to prevent the use of their products in executions, states often solicit the drugs from poorly regulated compounding pharmacies that may supply flawed alternatives. This has made lethal drugs for executions ever more hard to get, and extant stockpiles have grown old. Some states have begun turning to gas executions and firing squads to keep their capital-punishment regimes grinding along, a tacit admission that lethal injection is becoming untenable.
Pike is reportedly in critical condition. Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has once more halted executions for the foreseeable future while an independent review of what went wrong takes place. As more prisoners experience agony on gurneys and survive their execution attempts, more states can be expected to similarly examine the safety of their capital-punishment protocols. But these third-party investigators will not discover a reliably swift and painless method of administering lethal injections, because the method itself is flawed. States must let go of the faulty premise that killing people via intravenous poisoning is somehow more humane than more obviously grisly methods such as hanging and electrocution. America’s experiment with lethal injection has failed.
*Illustration sources: J. Miles Cary / Knoxville News Sentinel / USA Today / Reuters; Florilegius / Universal Images Group / Getty; Ron Bull/Toronto Star / Getty; Bernard Chantal / Alamy.
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