Can an Execution Be Ethical?

It’s much harder to kill an otherwise healthy adult human being than you probably think. Gunshot wounds (most of them self-inflicted or accidental) have an overall mortality rate right around 15 percent—higher if the shot is in the head, but still shockingly far from 100 percent. If you are bitten by a rattlesnake in America, your chance of dying is less than one in 600. The five-year survival rate for malignant brain cancer is around 33 percent.

All of which partly explains why there is such a thing as a “botched execution.”

The subject is in the news due to the attempted lethal injection of Christa Pike on September 30, by the state of Tennessee, which convicted her three decades ago of killing Colleen Slemmer, a classmate, in an especially brutal way. After two different injections of pentobarbital, Pike remained alive and reportedly conscious for much of it, and she was rushed by ambulance to a nearby hospital. It was the second botched execution by lethal injection in the state this year. The governor of Tennessee, Bill Lee, has now ordered a pause on all executions for the remainder of the year and ordered what the Johnson City Press calls “a review of the state’s policies on how it puts people to death.”