On the night Tahina Corcoran watched the state kill her husband at the Indiana State Prison, she rushed back to her car as fast as she could. It was around 1 a.m. on December 18, and she had already checked out of her hotel. “I knew before we headed to the prison for the execution that I would most likely want to get as far away from Michigan City as possible,” she said. She didn’t stop to talk to anyone. “I hated everybody there.”

She broke down when she got inside the car. Tahina’s 30-year-old son Justin, who also witnessed the execution, tried to comfort her. Then they started the two-hour trip back home. They didn’t discuss what they had seen. “I just kept thinking, ‘I gotta get me home, I gotta get me and my son home.’”

The following days were a blur. She was in shock and felt numb. She’d had the foresight to finish all her holiday preparations long before the execution. “Everything was wrapped, all the decorations were up, all the food was bought for Christmas dinner,” she recalled. So she focused on retrieving her husband’s remains, picking them up just before New Year’s. “And as I was carrying his box of ashes, I just remember thinking to myself, ‘Wow, this is our first actual car ride together.’”

Tahina, 48, had known Joseph Corcoran since middle school. Over his 26 years on death row, she actually married him twice: first about five years after he was sentenced to die, and again two months before his execution. Her two kids, now grown, had been raised to know Corcoran and why he was on death row. “They knew that, you know, Joe was sick and that he was in prison,” Tahina said. “And they just knew that their mommy was very happy with Joe, and Joe was always a part of our family.”

Corcoran was 22 years old when he shot his brother, James, and three other men in Fort Wayne. His lawyers would argue that his actions were driven by undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenia. From the start of his incarceration, Corcoran was convinced that prison guards were using an ultrasound machine to force him to speak. He repeatedly said he wished to drop his appeals and volunteer for execution. Although prosecutors accused him of faking his delusions, Tahina saw them firsthand. “He was very mentally ill,” she said. “And Joe believed that the only way that he could escape this torment and torture was by dying.”

Corcoran was the first person executed by the state of Indiana in 15 years. As in many places, the state’s execution chamber had remained dormant due to a lack of available drugs used to carry out lethal injection. But in June 2024, then-Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb made an announcement. “After years of effort, the Indiana Department of Correction has acquired a drug — pentobarbital — which can be used to carry out executions,” he said. Within months, at the state attorney general’s request, the Indiana Supreme Court had scheduled two execution dates: Corcoran on December 18, and Benjamin Ritchie on May 20, 2025.

Indiana’s new drug protocol — a single, massive dose of pentobarbital — was the same formula used by the federal government, which carried out 13 executions at the U.S. penitentiary in Terre Haute during President Donald Trump’s first term. Death penalty states had adopted the one-drug method despite doubts over its efficacy and turned to compounding pharmacies to obtain it. But the results could be disturbing. Some people executed with the pentobarbital appeared to suffer on the gurney, and autopsies consistently showed pulmonary edema — fluid in the lungs that, according to experts, would feel like drowning.

“Joe knew that he was kind of a guinea pig,” Tahina said. He wanted an autopsy to be carried out after his death, she said, because he knew something could go wrong. He also allowed a journalist with the Indiana Capital Chronicle to be added to his personal witness list — a way to circumvent a state ban on media witnesses. But in the end, things seemed to go mostly according to plan. The curtains went up at 12:34 a.m. Corcoran was declared dead 10 minutes later. “After a brief movement of his left hand and fingers at about 12:37 a.m.,” the journalist reported, “Corcoran did not move again.”

But the execution of Benjamin Ritchie five months later did not go smoothly. Tahina was watching the livestream of a vigil outside the prison hosted by Death Penalty Action that night, when viewers received word that Ritchie had moved unexpectedly on the gurney. “He violently sat up — raised his shoulders — and twitched violently for about three seconds,” one defense attorney told reporters.

Tahina was horrified. But it wasn’t until she read additional coverage weeks later that she began to question what she had seen at her husband’s execution. One expert said that pentobarbital “should be really, really effective — really fast. No one should move.” This had not been the case with Corcoran. “You could see his hands twitching,” Tahina said. This echoed the initial news reports. But she also saw something other witnesses did not: “Joe tried to raise his head up.” Justin, who was sitting behind her, described the same thing. “To........

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