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. Call it executive dysfunction. Of these, four did not succeed in bringing about death at all.
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. 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. Most juries in capital cases choose life instead.
Last year Florida killed 19 people, more than in any year since the federal moratorium was lifted, and has generated no reports of mishandling. The annual number of new death sentences issued has fallen by over 90% since the 1990s; last year, there were just 23.
And yet the administration of lethal injection continues to be mishandled. 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. Thanks to new impetus from Republican governors, last year 47 Americans were put to death, the highest figure in over 15 years.
Because doctors and nurses take seriously their oath to do no harm, many are carried out by people with no medical background,.
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. 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.
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.
