After Tennessee’s failed attempt to execute Christa Pike last week, an ambulance rushed her to a Nashville hospital, where the convicted murderer became a patient in desperate need of life-saving care.
If Pike had recovered from two bad pentobarbital injections, she might have gone the other way after recovering enough to be killed.
The bizarre incident illustrates the consequences of trying to hide the harsh reality of the death penalty by wearing medical clothing.
Although most Americans say murderers like Pike should be executed, their preferred method suggests they are squeamish about what it would mean to admit.
Last year, Gallup’s support for the death penalty was 52 percent, 28 percentage points below the 1994 peak.
Multiple surveys show that a vast majority of Americans believe lethal injection – first used by Oklahoma in 1977 – is the “most humane” method of execution, preferring it to firing squads, hangings, electric chairs and gas chambers.
The Supreme Court accepted that view in 2008, upholding Kentucky’s three-drug execution method, which critics called questionable and unnecessarily complicated.
At the time, three dozen states had adopted lethal injection, which Chief Justice John Roberts described as the result of “a fervent desire to provide a progressively more humane form of death.”
In Roberts’ view, lethal injection is more humane than “firing squads, hangings, electric chairs and gas chambers.”
Although lethal injection doesn’t look as ugly as those older methods, appearances can be deceiving.
As Fordham University law professor Deborah Denno pointed out months before the decision, execution methods that are less painful to watch may also be less painful to experience.
“To me,” she told The New York Times, “the firing squad was the most humane” even though it was “considered the most brutal.”
Since then, most death penalty states have moved to single-drug regimens, often involving lethal doses of pentobarbital.
But as the execution attempt on Pike showed, the change doesn’t eliminate the challenge of finding an available vein and ensuring the drug enters the bloodstream rather than surrounding tissue — a task that can be complicated by pre-existing medical conditions.
Pike’s failed injection was the second such failure in Tennessee this year, prompting Gov. Bill Lee to put a moratorium on executions until he could clarify exactly what went wrong.
But last week’s “tragedy” (as Lee describes it) is just the latest example of a problem that dates back more than 40 years: Long-term lethal injection, characterized by troubling signs that the method should avoid unnecessary suffering.
The lethal injection drug has been difficult to procure due to the reluctance of pharmaceutical companies to supply it, and has also proven to be very expensive, with each dose of pentobarbital costing up to $300,000.
Because the drug degrades relatively quickly, much of the money may be wasted when pentobarbital remains unused beyond its 90-day shelf life.
Largely for these reasons, lawmakers are reconsidering the merits of firing squads, and five states now allow executions under at least some circumstances.
Convicted killers also see an advantage — last year in South Carolina, three inmates chose a firing squad over lethal injection.
It’s easy to understand why: The Death Penalty Information Center reviewed cases from 1890 to 2010 and found that lethal injection had the highest execution failure rate, about 7 percent, compared with 5 percent for gas executions, 3 percent for hanging, and 2 percent for electrocution.
The firing squad execution rate is 0%.
The evidence underscores what some countries have overlooked in their rush to embrace lethal injection: Glorifying executions does not necessarily make them faster or more reliable.
The pursuit of “more humane” execution methods is ostensibly to minimize the discomfort of criminals sentenced to death, but in fact is to alleviate the public’s discomfort with cold-blooded killings.
Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason magazine.