The death penalty is always cruel and unusual

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Sophia Laurenzi is a journalist and former investigator for death row appeals in Tennessee.

On Wednesday evening, the state of Tennessee injected Christa Pike with a lethal dose of a sedative to carry out her death sentence for the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer. Almost 10 minutes after the injection, Ms. Pike said, “My arm feels like it’s about to burst open.” Prison officials administered a second dose.

But more than an hour after the execution started, she was still breathing. Ms. Pike is alive and receiving emergency medical care, but her condition remains uncertain.

Her botched execution attempt is the second time this year that the state of Tennessee could not complete a lethal injection. In May, Tony Carruthers lay strapped to the gurney for more than an hour as officials tried and failed to insert an intravenous line, until Gov. Bill Lee called off the execution and gave him a one-year reprieve.

I watched the press-conference livestream for Ms. Pike’s execution in horror. When I started my career in death-penalty defence in 2017, I assumed capital punishment was on its last, wobbly legs. The United States is the last Western democracy to still impose this archaic sentence. And though the number of states that do so is down to 27, America still clings to this merciless path, even as the veneer of a sanitized, painless death has been shattered. We cannot disguise executions as something other than what they are: fundamentally violent killings by the state.

Lethal injection, which has been the default method of execution in the U.S. for decades, was originally touted as a humane alternative to the brutality of hangings, firing squads and electrocutions. But most pharmaceutical companies refuse to sell their drugs for use in executions, and medical professionals have reservations, if not outright ethical restrictions, from being involved. That has resulted in an unpredictable, secretive process with a higher botch rate than any other method of execution.

So what happened in Tennessee this week is only a reflection of what’s been playing out in the state for years, and in other death-penalty states in America. When I started my investigator job in August, 2018, it was the same month that Tennessee resumed executions after drug procurement issues and years of litigation put a nine-year pause on them. That first execution took 20 excruciating minutes. Five of the six men whose execution dates followed chose to die in the electric chair, including one of my clients, rather than risk suffering for so long.

After another pause during the pandemic, executions were set to start again. But an hour before Oscar Smith’s 2022 execution, his attorneys discovered the drugs hadn’t been tested for endotoxins. Mr. Lee halted it and ordered an independent review, which found that none of the state’s recent lethal injection drugs had been properly tested. Tennessee wrote a new protocol using a single drug, pentobarbital, and resumed executions in 2025.

What to know about pentobarbital, the drug used in the failed execution in Tennessee

Since then, at least three of Tennessee’s six attempted executions have been mangled. Other states facing the same failures have reverted to older methods, or invented new ones. South Carolina shot three men with a firing squad in 2025. Alabama filled gas masks with nitrogen; Louisiana followed suit.

The U.S. Supreme Court stopped Alabama from using nitrogen gas this June after lower courts found it was cruel and unusual. But that decision came too late for Kenneth Smith and Alan Miller. In 2022, both survived initial lethal injection attempts in Alabama when their IV lines couldn’t be inserted; in 2024, they were both killed with nitrogen gas.

For now, Mr. Lee has paused all executions in Tennessee for the second time in his two terms. But Marsha Blackburn, the Republican nominee for governor, says she would make the electric chair Tennessee’s default. There is nothing to stop the state from trying again to execute Mr. Carruthers or Ms. Pike, should she survive.

Ultimately, for many proponents, humane is not the goal: in their view, no method comes close to what murder victims suffer. At the intersection of fear and vengeance, the death penalty claws deep into the American consciousness. Yet while support sits at a slim majority, it has steadily declined to an all-time low, driven partly by horror stories like Ms. Pike’s. New death sentences have become rarer. Medical professionals across political party lines have admonished lethal injections.

Politicians will respond to Ms. Pike’s botched execution by promoting alternate methods and promising swift justice. But this week’s events affirm there is no way to execute people that is not cruel and arbitrary. We are human. We feel rage, grief, fear, and sometimes, a desire for revenge. That’s why Americans should demand that the state we fund and entrust with immense power be better than our worst impulses, not a mirror of them.