Capital punishment logistical failures a self-fulfilling strategy of death penalty opponents?

• Death Row never was, and never will be, a place free from pain and chaos. That is the nature of the capital punishment beast.

The Christa Pike botched execution debacle in Tennessee raises a question that has persisted since the U.S. corrections system began seeking a more “humane” and sanitized method for the state to exact the ultimate punishment on criminals.

Pike, 50, was scheduled for execution by the State of Tennessee on Sept. 30 for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. The execution team administered two doses of phenobarbital, but the lethal drugs failed to enter the condemned woman’s veins. Instead of dying, Pike went into severe physical distress.

Today, she’s hospitalized as the state figures out what’s next. Tennessee has halted executions for the rest of 2026. Tennessee’s Corrections Commissioner has resigned. Litigation of several stripes is expected, and the incident has cast all executions using lethal injection into doubt.

But lethal injections aren’t a new method of capital punishment. Texas inmate Charles Brooks Jr. was the first U.S. prisoner executed by that method on Dec. 7, 1982, at the Huntsville Prison. Botched executions – whether by hanging, electrocution, the gas chamber, lethal injection, or firing squad – have occurred in just over 3% of cases since 1890. That’s according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Lethal injection was supposed to have been the answer to a safer, more humane system of implementing capital punishment. Essentially, the argument went, the state puts the inmate to sleep, and they don’t wake up. That was the theory, at any rate.

Let’s pause here for an instant. This isn’t a new observation, but it’s relevant.

As someone who has witnessed executions at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman as a journalist, please allow me to point out the absolute absurdity of the notion that we ever had or ever will have a neat, antiseptic method of execution that guarantees no pain or suffering for the inmate.

I’ve seen two Mississippi inmates executed in the gas chamber and later served as a media witness when two were executed by lethal injections. Some 13 years passed between the last Mississippi gas chamber executions in the late 1980s and the state’s first lethal injection execution in 2002, when I saw inmate Tracy Alan Hansen put to death for the brutal killing of State Trooper Bruce Ladner.

But almost as soon as lethal injection – the supposedly “humane” method – was implemented, death penalty opponents began a systematic legal challenge to the drugs used (and their manufacture and availability), the personnel who administer the injections (and their qualifications), and whether the inmates experienced any conscious pain.

In blunt terms, death penalty opponents attacked the supply chain necessary to implement lethal injections by protests and corporate shaming, lobbied medical boards to enforce ethical bans against health professionals taking part in the executions while simultaneously arguing that it can only work with qualified medical personnel, and a never-ending ebb-and-flow of litigation to delay the process and then litigate the delay.

So where does that leave us in Mississippi if we intend to maintain the death penalty for the most heinous crimes? During the 2017 regular session of the Mississippi Legislature, lawmakers amended the law to allow death sentences to be carried out by lethal injection, nitrogen hypoxia, electrocution, or firing squad.

We’re not talking about whether the death penalty should be imposed as punishment for crimes — the moral argument. We’re not talking about disparities in who receives the death penalty based on race or economic status — the fairness argument. We’re not even talking about Mississippi’s failures to fund a credible, working indigent defense and post-conviction appeal process — the due process argument.

But the notion that in venues like Mississippi, where the voters embrace use of the death penalty, there is some magic execution method in which inmates are guaranteed not to experience pain is a fool’s errand. The death penalty is neither clean nor easy nor painless — the people decide to take the life of an individual as punishment for their crimes.

Death Row never was, and never will be, a place free from pain and chaos. That is the nature of the capital punishment beast, and the only way to change that is to get out of the capital punishment business.