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Capital punishment is surging in the US – but after Christa Pike’s botched execution, what is its future?

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It took more than an hour to establish the two intravenous lines through which Christa Pike would be injected with a giant and normally lethal dose of the sedative pentobarbital, and in that time she did everything she could to assist those who were attempting to kill her.

“Please try here,” she said over and over again to Tennessee’s execution team, pointing to specific parts of her body where she thought they might find a vein as they repeatedly stabbed her with needles. “Please try here, I think it will be OK. Please try up on my shoulder, higher.”

When the team finally achieved what they thought would be a working line, allowing her execution to proceed, Pike, 50, made a point of thanking them. “Miss Pike was kind, and she was cooperative,” her lawyer Randy Spivey, a witness in the death chamber, said.

The world knows what happened next. For reasons as yet not fully understood, the drug did not enter her bloodstream, probably spilling into her arm tissue.

Pike, who was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder when she was 18 of her classmate Colleen Slemmer, remained alive. She is the only person ever to survive a full “lethal” injection execution.

On Tuesday she remarkably regained consciousness. She is now able to talk and walk around the room, her lawyers have said.

In comments to reporters, Spivey said that he was haunted by the harrowing failed execution. “What I saw is not something that should ever happen again. It was done in all of our names.”

The events of the past 10 days – starting with Pike amicably assisting her executioners and ending with her waking up shackled to a Nashville hospital bed, her arms grotesquely swollen, facing a long and uncertain road to recovery – has thrown America into a frenzy. If this is the outcome of a punishment carried out in “all our names”, then what are we doing about it?

“This is a very big moment,” said Laura Porter, executive director at the US Campaign to End the Death Penalty, an alliance of 60 abolitionist groups. “When you see something as horrific as this, the impact is enormous, as it throws attention on the death penalty’s flaws.”

Porter has been closely involved in America’s struggle with capital punishment for almost a quarter century, since she became a leader of New Yorkers Against the Death Penalty in 2003. At that time death row prisoners were still being killed at a rate of more than one a week.

There were 71 executions that year in the US (down from the 1999 pinnacle of 98). Since then, Porter has watched and agitated as the number has steadily declined for almost two decades, reaching a low of just 11 judicial killings in 2021.

“I believe that the death penalty will die by a thousand cuts,” she said. “Every time there’s a botched execution like Christa’s, or a wrongful conviction, or the execution of an intellectually disabled person, public understanding of the system’s flaws grows.”

How great a difference a few years can make. Six years ago, there was such confidence in the historic fading away of the practice that the authoritative Death Penalty Information Center (DPI) began its yearly report with the words: “Capital punishment continued to wither across the US in 2019”.

But as Mark Twain might have put it, reports of the death penalty’s own death turned out to be an exaggeration. Fast forward to last year, and DPI was recording that the 47 executions carried out in 2025 marked the highest incidence in 16 years.

No awards for guessing the key individual behind the resurgence. Less than a year after DPI’s “withering” pronouncement, Donald Trump embarked on one of the most concentrated bursts of US state killing of its own citizens in modern times.

Toward the end of his first presidency, the Trump administration executed 13 federal death row prisoners. They included Lisa Montgomery, a woman with such a shocking history of childhood sexual abuse it bears comparison to Pike’s own.

Since his return to the White House last year, Trump has used the full might of the presidency to supercharge executions. On his first day back he issued an executive order on “restoring the death penalty” in which he said it was “an essential tool for deterring and punishing those who would commit the most heinous crimes”.

The statement was a classic Trump fabrication. The US justice department itself has concluded that there is no proof that the punishment deters criminals. Many prisoners on death row cannot be described as the most heinous, not least the 4% who by conservative estimations are innocent.

At federal level, Trump has been hampered by Joe Biden, who before he left office commuted the death penalties of all but three prisoners on federal death row. Using his power as commander-in-chef, Trump still managed this week to order the military execution by firing squad of Nidal Hasan, the 2009 Fort Hood mass shooter.

On Thursday the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, breathlessly announced that Hasan would face a firing squad of soldiers at Fort Hood on 3 December in the first public execution to be staged in the US since 1936. “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public, because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things.”

The Pentagon’s plan to livestream Hasan’s execution prompted a second wave of desbelief that ricocheted around the globe , threatening to drown out even the consternation over Pike’s treatment. US politicians denounced the idea as “disgusting”, while the UN issued the US government with the same stern warning it has given Afghanistan and Iran that the move would be tantamount to torture.

When not presiding over an administration that seems determined to turn the clock back 100 years, Trump has also used his squawk box to exhort death penalty states, where most capital punishment activity occurs, to hit the gas. Many have obliged.

First among them has been Florida. The outgoing governor, Ron DeSantis, appears to have been so inspired by Trump’s 2020-21 killing spree that he greenlit a record 19 executions last year.

DeSantis will come close to matching that shattering number in 2026. Florida has already put to death 16 prisoners this year, with two more executions pending, though the governor cancelled a lethal injection procedure on Friday without giving an explanation.

Nationwide, the US is set to kill up to 38 people this year – the most recent just on Wednesday when Texas executed convicted murderer Jamaal Howard. That tally would be down from last year’s high, but still represent a larger display of state killing than in any year since 2013.

In cheerleading the revival of executions, Trump has been backed by a supporting cast of Christian nationalists. These Bible thumpers have injected their eye-for-an-eye brand of retributive justice into the wider Maga movement.

Brooklyn Walker, an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, has studied Christian nationalist views on justice. She has found them to be far more embracing of retribution, including the death sentence, than other US religious groups.

Christian nationalist leaders frequently invoke Old Testament notions of punitive justice “as part of the idea of creating a social order, and then requiring people to fit within it,” Walker said.

Doug Wilson, an Idaho pastor who wants to turn America into a theocracy and has close ties to Hegseth, has pushed for legal appeals to be streamlined. That way death row prisoners could be dispatched more quickly.

Joel Webbon, another leading Christian nationalist pastor from Texas, has argued for the death penalty to be expanded to include women who make false sexual assault accusations. The day after Pike’s failed execution he posted to his 120,000 followers on X that “you cannot be pro life without being pro death penalty”.

The energy blown into capital punishment from such far-right religious pundits is affecting the furious debate that has now erupted in Tennessee over what should happen to Pike. Marsha Blackburn, the Republican candidate for Tennessee governor, wants to plug back in the electric chair.

Blackburn’s call for the return of “Old Sparky” speaks volumes about the state of capital punishment. The horrifying scenes at Pike’s attempted execution were part of a wider unravelling of lethal injections, the protocol that has been dominant in the US for almost 50 years.

By DPI’s calculations, there have been 12 botched executions in the past five years alone. Five of the condemned prisoners involved, including Pike herself, survived the procedure meaning that they were rendered immobile while a team of masked strangers failed to kill them for up to several hours.

Amid such unconscionable suffering, the claim made on behalf of lethal injections that they are a medicalised and humane form of ending a life has come unstuck. Who would dare to classify what Pike endured as humane?

Proponents of the ultimate punishment have been forced to seek alternatives that might avoid some of the pitfalls of lethal injections. But the moment they have introduced such often archaic methods they have run into a whole new set of headaches.

Two of the prisoners who survived recent lethal injections, Alan Miller and Kenneth Smith, were executed by Alabama a year later under the experimental technique, nitrogen gas. The method is regarded by veterinarians as too cruel for the euthanisia of cats and dogs, and it has now been blocked for human use by a federal court.

Other states have tried the firing squad. But when South Carolina took this path last year with Mikal Mahdi, a convicted murderer, the marksmen missed the target of the prisoner’s heart, causing him a prolonged and likely agonising death.

Such an avalanche of mishaps, spanning botched executions, experimentation, and even dark insinuations of deliberate miss-targeting, is what Porter means by her “death by a thousand cuts”. It gives her and her army of abolitionists the material they need to sustain a long campaign.

As a seasoned abolitionist, Porter knows that she is facing tough adversaries in Trump and the Christian nationalists. But she draws sustenance from the 23 states that have scrapped the death penalty which, if you add the four states that have put the practice on hold, pushes them into the majority.

Then there is the growing number of young Americans who no longer support the punishment. In the most recent Gallup poll that asked the question, from 2024, only 42% of 18 to 34 year olds approved. (In last year’s poll the overall extent of support had fallen from a 1995 high of 80% to 52%).

She also takes heart from the burgeoning ranks of Republican state lawmakers willing to raise objections. And by the increasing unwillingness of juries to mete out new death sentences.

Most of all, she’s buoyed up by the powerful accord she has found from an unlikely source: families of capital murder victims. Amid their grief, some families have had the strength and conviction to join the fight to spare the lives of those who killed their loved ones.

“In every campaign I’ve been part of where we’ve ended the death penalty – in Connecticut, Maryland, Virginia, and many more – victims’ families have been among the lead voices,” Porter said.

To those voices we may perhaps, in time, be able to add one more. It would be the most unlikely voice of all – that of a woman whom the modern state, with all its paraphernalia, could not silence: Christa Pike.

Her lawyers tell us that she is angry and confused, her mind foggy. But she is also able to inquire after the well-being of others, including, poignantly, the family of her victim, Colleen Slemmer.

She is not out of the woods: on Saturday she was released from hospital and returned to the women’s prison in Nashville, where she will still receive medical care. But coming from a state of unconsciousness so profound that even her own legal team feared she might be brain-dead, her reemergence has been nothing short of astonishing.

It all leaves so many questions, her lawyer Spivey said ruefully on Wednesday. “We have to ask, ‘How much suffering is enough?’”

Spivey directed the question at Tennessee. He might just as well have been addressing America.

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