In Nashville on Wednesday night, America’s dance with the death penalty came to this: after failing to kill Christa Pike, the first woman facing execution in Tennessee for two centuries, the state rushed her to a hospital where medical staff attempted to save her life.

In any rational country, those facts alone would be enough to consign death row to the ash heap of history. But this is America, where 27 states plus the federal government still maintain death chambers (although California, Ohio, Oregon and Pennsylvania have moratoria in place temporarily halting their use).

Pike has been on death row since 1996, when she and her then-boyfriend were convicted for the fatal stabbing and beating of their classmate Colleen Slemmer in Knoxville in 1995. While Pike, 18 at the time of the crime, was sentenced to death, her boyfriend received a life sentence because he was 17.

While Pike, now 50, does not deny the killing, her supporters say her age at the time as well as mental illness and allegations of sexual abuse should be considered. Pike was diagnosed with bipolar disorder after the killing and claimed that while she had wanted to fight Slemmer, she only killed her in the heat of the attack.

She had been scheduled for execution at 10am on Wednesday. After the injections failed to kill her, her lawyers filed emergency motions to stay the execution, which they said was violating her right to be executed free of cruel and unusual punishment. “Failure to provide such care constitutes deliberate indifference to legitimate, serious medical needs,” one motion said. It said the Department of Correction should begin lifesaving measures.

The notion that medical technicians were trying to kill Pike in one state facility but then doctors and nurses were trying to save her life in another is mad enough. But Tennessee and its fellow states still seeking to execute inmates are further morally compromised. They now make efforts to acquire the drugs for the supposedly “humane” process that went so badly wrong at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution on Wednesday night. 

Last week at the United Nations, Donald Trump likened Latin America’s drug cartels to Islamic State (“the ISIS of the Western hemisphere”, he called them). Yet those US states seeking to put death row inmates to sleep are themselves turning to black-market, unapproved and unregulated suppliers of pentobarbital and the other drugs used in the execution process. 

So controversial has the death penalty become that Tennessee’s secrecy laws now prevent death row inmates, their lawyers, journalists or voters from ascertaining where the state secures the drugs used to kill death row inmates.

It was only in 2024 that Tennessee switched from three drugs for lethal injections to solely pentobarbital, after another execution was abruptly halted, with the state admitting it had failed to make sure the drugs had been properly tested.

In Pike’s case, two full syringes of pentobarbital were administered to slow her central nervous system and induce sleep. Neither appears to have worked, raising fresh questions about where the supplies were purchased and how long they had been stored prior to use. Tennessee is unlikely to offer any transparency over that process.

Two years ago, one of the major manufacturers of pentobarbital announced it would no longer produce the drug. Connecticut-based Absolute Standards was identified as the source of drugs used in 13 federal executions in 2020 and 2021. Facing the prospect of state laws banning the manufacture of drugs used in executions, the company yielded, saying it had “no intention to resume any production or sale” of its product.

The Death Penalty Information Center (DPI), a Washington-based non-profit providing data and analysis on death row cases across the United States, reports that “for more than a decade, departments of corrections across the United States have had difficulty acquiring some of the drugs traditionally used in executions”, with more than a dozen states enacting secrecy laws to shield their procurement process from public scrutiny.

Last year, it was revealed that one Idaho prison warden had secured six vials of pentobarbital by meeting two people on a remote rural road who were carrying the stash in the back of their car. Court documents revealed that Tim Richardson, the warden of a maximum-security prison near Boise, testified that he chose the “off-site” location for the transaction in order “not to draw attention to it”.

Polls show that voters have dramatically soured on the use of the country’s death chambers. Gallup’s surveys show only 13 per cent of Americans disapproved of the death penalty in 1995. Today, 44 per cent of Americans oppose it.

But the nation’s executioners have one very enthusiastic and powerful champion in the White House. Trump has taken unprecedented steps to hasten the use of the death penalty, after presiding over the record-breaking execution of 13 inmates on the federal government’s death row in Terre Haute, Indiana, during the final year of his first term.

Former US president Joe Biden then commuted the sentences of 37 of the remaining 40 federal death row inmates. But back in power, Trump signed a raft of executive orders within hours of his return to the Oval Office in January 2025, including one that orders the Attorney General to “take all necessary and lawful action” to help states obtain lethal injection drugs.

Trump’s return to power has heralded a substantial rise in the pace of executions, despite the fact that 23 states have outlawed its use completely. Had Pike died in Tennessee on Wednesday, she would have been the 29th person put to death this year. Fifteen people have been executed in Florida, six in Texas, three in Oklahoma, two in Alabama, and one in both Tennessee and Arizona, the DPI said.

Last year, a total of 47 executions were successfully conducted, the highest annual total since 2009.  In contrast, under Biden, there were 11 executions in 2021, 18 in 2022, 24 in 2023 and 25 in 2024.

As a private citizen, Trump famously took out newspaper adverts calling for the execution of the Central Park five who were arrested for the rape of a jogger in New York in 1989. The charges against them were later dismissed after another man confessed.

Since returning to the presidency, he has called for anyone convicted of murder in Washington DC to be executed, more than 40 years after the district banned capital punishment. He called the threat “a very strong preventative… We have no choice.”

Tennessee’s governor, Bill Lee, says he has ordered “a comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred” during Pike’s botched execution. He also halted this year’s remaining planned executions in the state. In May, an earlier execution of another convicted murderer, Tony Carruthers, was abandoned after prison staff were unable to find a sufficiently viable vein for the administration of his lethal injection.

But even by the state’s already tarnished standards, the moral contradiction of first trying to execute Pike and then battling to save her life represents a new low in the death penalty’s history in America. It also serves as a warning to those in the UK who favour the restoration of capital punishment, proving that finding an acceptable way of putting people to death is a moral and ethical literal dead end.