Prettifying Executions Does Not Make Them Quicker or More Reliable

After Tennessee unsuccessfully tried to execute Christa Pike last week, an ambulance whisked her to a Nashville hospital, where the condemned murderer became a patient in urgent need of lifesaving care. Should Pike recover from two botched administrations of pentobarbital, which left her unconscious and unable to breathe on her own, she might travel that road in reverse after she is well enough to be killed.

That bizarre episode illustrates the perverse consequences of trying to disguise the brutal reality of capital punishment by dressing it in medical garb. Although most Americans say murderers like Pike should be executed, the method they prefer suggests they are squeamish about admitting what that entails.

Last year, Gallup put support for the death penalty at 52 percent, 28 percentage points lower than the peak recorded in 1994. According to several surveys, Americans overwhelmingly view lethal injection, first adopted by Oklahoma in 1977, as “the most humane” method of execution, preferring it to firing squads, hanging, the electric chair, and the gas chamber.

The Supreme Court embraced that view in 2008, when it upheld Kentucky’s three-drug execution method, which critics portrayed as iffy and needlessly complicated. At that point, three dozen states had adopted lethal injection, which Chief Justice John Roberts described as the result of “an earnest desire to provide for a progressively more humane manner of death.”

As Roberts saw it, lethal injection was “more humane” than “the firing squad, hanging, the electric chair, and the gas chamber.” But while lethal injection might look less ugly than those older methods, appearances can be deceptive.

As Fordham University law professor Deborah Denno noted a few months before that decision, execution methods that are less painful to watch may not be less painful to experience. “To me,” she told The New York Times, “the firing squad is the most humane,” although it is “perceived to be the most brutal.”

Since then, most death-penalty states have shifted to a single-drug protocol, typically involving a lethal dose of pentobarbital. But as the attempted execution of Pike shows, that change has not eliminated the challenge of finding a usable vein and making sure the drug enters the bloodstream rather than surrounding tissue—a task that can be complicated by preexisting medical conditions.

Pike’s aborted lethal injection was the second such failure in Tennessee this year, and it prompted Gov. Bill Lee to suspend executions until he can clarify exactly what went wrong. But last week’s “tragedy” (as Lee described it) was just the latest example of a problem that goes back more than 40 years: prolonged lethal injections featuring disturbing signs of the needless suffering that the method is supposed to avoid.

Lethal injection drugs, which are difficult to source because pharmaceutical companies are loath to supply them, also have proven to be exorbitantly expensive, costing as much as $300,000 for each dose of pentobarbital. And since the drug degrades relatively quickly, much of that money may be wasted when pentobarbital goes unused for longer than its 90-day shelf life.

Largely for those reasons, legislators are reconsidering the virtues of firing squads, which five states currently allow in at least some circumstances. Condemned killers also see an advantage: Last year in South Carolina, three prisoners chose the firing squad over lethal injection.

It is not hard to see why. Reviewing cases from 1890 through 2010, the Death Penalty Information Center found that lethal injection had the highest rate of botched executions: about 7 percent, compared to 5 percent for lethal gas, 3 percent for hanging, and 2 percent for electrocution. The rate for firing squads was 0 percent.

Such evidence underlines a point that states overlooked in their rush to embrace lethal injection: Prettifying executions does not necessarily make them quicker or more reliable. The quest for “more humane” execution methods, ostensibly an effort to minimize the discomfort of condemned criminals, actually aims to relieve the public’s discomfort with killing people in cold blood.

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