US executions rise as botched lethal injections raise ethical questions over future of death penalty

KUALA LUMPUR, 11 OCTOBER 2026 —

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 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.