Advice from an Executioner After a Botched Execution

On Wednesday night, the state of Tennessee failed to execute Christa Pike, a convicted murderer, despite giving her a double dose of a drug that was meant to kill her. Since then, Pike has been in critical condition and is receiving medical attention, according to her lawyers, and has reignited a fierce debate about the role of the death penalty in the criminal justice system.

Among those rattled by the incident is Frank Thompson, the former superintendent of the Oregon State Penitentiary. The state has carried out only two executions over the past 60 years, in 1996 and 1997. Thompson planned and oversaw both of them, including construction of the room where the two men died by lethal injection.

When I asked Thompson, 83, who stepped down from the job nearly 30 years ago, about Pike’s botched execution, he told me that he was less concerned about why exactly it went sideways and more focused on the bigger questions it surfaces. Planning for and carrying out executions turned Thompson against the death penalty, and he hopes that Tennessee governor Bill Lee’s decision to postpone the last execution scheduled for this year will give lawmakers time to consider the subject seriously.