The Pike and Hasan Cases Reveal That Routine Executions Are Separated From Unbearable Ones by a Vanishingly Fine Line
Source: Amy Davidson Sorkin. "Facing the Death Penalty | The New Yorker." October 16, 2026. www.newyorker.com
The Gist
The author argues that two recent cases, a botched lethal injection in Tennessee and a plan to broadcast a firing-squad execution, show how thin the line is between an execution that seems ordinary and one that seems horrifying. Court reforms and procedural tweaks can't hide that the death penalty is brutal at its core. The U.S. is also keeping company with very few other wealthy democracies in using it.
Conclusion
The death penalty as practiced in the United States is essentially brutal, and no procedural adjustment can conceal that. The line between a 'routine' execution and an 'unbearable' one is vanishingly fine, as shown by Christa Pike's botched execution and the plan to live-stream Nidal Hasan's firing-squad death.
Premises
- Tennessee's attempt to execute Christa Pike failed grotesquely: after about seven needle attempts and two doses of pentobarbital she was still alive, in apparent pain, and later hospitalized. Her lawyers call this torture.
- Pike's case is not an isolated anomaly: lethal injection is the most common U.S. method, and I.V. problems have derailed more than half a dozen executions since 2009, including another in Tennessee in May.
- Much of what happened to Pike was hidden behind a closed curtain, so it is unclear how the night would have ended had no one been watching. Witnesses are therefore a necessary check on the process.
- The Hasan live-stream plan showed that the opposite extreme, execution as public spectacle, is also available to officials. It would have been 'grubby death-cult revelry' that might have granted Hasan his wish to be a martyr, and even some death-penalty supporters were repelled by it.
- The U.S. is an outlier among peer nations: only the U.S. and Japan regularly carry out executions among OECD members, and public executions are largely confined to countries like Iran and Afghanistan.
- The Supreme Court has tightened the death penalty's limits over time (for example on juvenile offenders), but these welcome adjustments do not change the practice's underlying brutality.
Assumptions
- A botched execution reveals something inherent in capital punishment rather than a correctable failure of one state's execution team.
- The cases of Pike and Hasan are representative enough to support a general claim about the death penalty.
- If an execution can be made 'unbearable' by incompetence or by showmanship, no execution is truly 'routine' or humane.
- Moral revulsion shown by the public, journalists, and some supporters is evidence that the practice is morally problematic.
- International practice among peer nations is a relevant moral benchmark for U.S. policy.
- The Eighth Amendment's prohibition on 'cruel and unusual punishments' should be read in light of evolving standards, and the practice's brutality bears on its constitutionality or morality.