Grim new chapters in the American death penalty

New developments

The botched execution of Christa Pike and the threats of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to televise an execution by firing squad renew our attention to the practice of capital punishment in the United States. On October 1, after the U.S. Supreme Court lifted a stay of execution ordered by the Tennessee Court of Appeals, she was injected with doses of pentobarbital intended to be lethal. Yet this was not—to borrow Victor Hugo’s phrase—the last day of a condemned prisoner. Pike survived this brutal and painful ordeal, though the poisoning may well have left her with severe sequels. Even before she could leave her hospital bed another sordid chapter in the American death penalty began when Hegseth announced that Nidal Hasan’s execution scheduled for December 2026 would be live streamed, something that required the blessing of President Donald Trump.

When it became clear that the state had failed to kill Christa Pike, she was rushed to hospital where medical personnel struggled to save her life. But to what end? So, that another episode of judicial murder can take place?

A historical precedent

There is a precedent in American law. It is a case that reeks of the Jim Crow era—of legal lynching at the height of American apartheid. In 1946, the State of Louisiana failed to execute Willie Francis due to a malfunction of the electric chair, which had been installed by an intoxicated prison employee. Francis, a sixteen-year-old African American teenager, screamed, "Let me breathe!"

These words are reminiscent, today, of the desperate final plea of George Floyd. Willie Francis's lawyers appealed to the Supreme Court in an attempt to block a second execution attempt. The petition was rejected by a five-to-four vote. Robert Jackson, having just returned from his role as prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, cast the deciding fifth vote to reject the appeal. Francis was executed the following year, at the age of seventeen.

The current rise in executions

Twenty-five years ago, about 100 people were executed annually in the United States. That figure declined fairly steadily to a few more than twenty before seeing a dramatic rise following Donald Trump's accession to the presidency in 2025. Last year, forty-seven executions took place, compared to twenty-five in 2024. This situation is almost entirely due to the enthusiasm for capital punishment shown by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Since the start of the year more than half of the twenty-nine executions recorded in the United States have taken place in Florida. The others were carried out in Texas, Alabama, Oklahoma, and Tennessee. Eight executions are scheduled between now and the end of the year.

At the beginning of the century, 38 of the 50 US states authorised capital punishment. That number has fallen to twenty-seven, of which four observe a moratorium. This decline reflects the global trend toward abolishing the death penalty. However, in January 2025, one of Donald Trump’s first executive orders called for increased use of capital punishment. He directed federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty systematically. To date, Trump’s aggressive push for executions has had little direct impact, as the administration of criminal justice falls largely under the jurisdiction of individual states.

The federal death penalty

During the final months of his first term, Trump revived the federal death penalty. Only three people had been executed at the federal level between 1973 and 2020; the last execution had taken place in 2003. In the months leading up to his departure from the White House in January 2021, thirteen men and women were executed federally—almost all for crimes committed in the previous century. Barack Obama had failed to commute their sentences to life imprisonment; a step he had the authority to take at the end of his own term.

In 2025 at the end of his term, Joe Biden commuted thirty-seven death sentences. However, he left three men on death row, making their execution by his successor all but inevitable. Sadly, then, Obama and Biden, both of whom were on record opposing the death penalty, contributed to its application.

Inevitably, racism plays a role in the imposition of capital punishment in the United States. Thirteen of the twenty-nine people executed this year are Black. Black people account for approximately 40% of the roughly 2,000 people on death row awaiting execution. In the 1980s, the Supreme Court came within one vote of declaring the death penalty to be unconstitutional because it was infected with racial discrimination.

Christa Pike

In Christa Pike’s case, it appears the catheter leaked the poison into her body’s tissues rather than into her veins. According to her lawyer, her arms were ‘swollen, burned, and covered in blisters’.

The suffering endured by Christa Pike and others during attempted executions raises a significant legal issue. Acts of torture, as well as cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishment or treatment, are absolutely prohibited under both international law and the United States Constitution. Even if it is argued that there is no legal barrier in the United States to imposing the death penalty itself, its implementation cannot be lawful unless it guarantees freedom from barbaric treatment such as that suffered by Christa Pike.

There are currently around 2,000 death row inmates in the United States. The average age of these condemned men and women is more than fifty. The case of Christa Pike is fairly typical as she was fifty years old at the time of her execution in October 2026. She was convicted of a crime committed more than thirty years earlier, when she was eighteen.

In July, Florida executed 80-year-old Dominick Occhicone. He had been sentenced to death forty years earlier for a crime committed in 1984. The vast majority of death row inmates will die in prison of natural causes. They will never be executed.

The global position

Globally, only about thirty countries carry out capital punishment. Most resort to it very occasionally. The vast majority of executions worldwide today are carried out by China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Yemen, Iraq, and the United States.

The botched execution of Christa Pike and the threatened shooting of Nidal Hasan seem emblematic of America in the Trump era. However, opinion polls may well tend to overestimate support for capital punishment. Perhaps the disgust and outrage sparked by these latest chapters in the history of the death penalty in the United States will give rise to progressive initiatives.

Find out more about the Department of Law and Social Sciences at Middlesex University.