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The Right Way to Handle the Death Penalty

Even before her state botched another execution, gubernatorial candidate Jerri Green was telling Tennesseans that “the death penalty has always been inhumane, expensive, and biased.”

Media witnesses recount the moments before the execution of Christa Pike was halted Wednesday, September 30, 2026, in Nashville, Tennessee.

The botched execution of Tennessee death row inmate Christa Pike has added another compelling argument to the case for banning the death penalty. Following a pair of horrific attempts by the state to take the life of the 50-year-old women on Wednesday, The New York Times reported that a lawyer for Pike “said she was alive and receiving life-saving medical care on Thursday…. Ms. Pike survived an injection of two doses of the lethal drug pentobarbital in what was the state’s second bungled execution this year.”

The torturous debacle was described by Robin Maher, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, as “the worst we’ve seen” in a long history of botched executions in American states. It was so awful, so “deeply disturbing,” in fact, that Tennessee Governor Bill Lee ordered a review of the hours-long attempt to kill Pike, halted executions in Tennessee, and called the nightmarish incident “a tragedy.”

Yet Lee, a longtime backer of capital punishment, defended state-sanctioned killing. “The people of Tennessee have determined that capital punishment is the appropriate sentence for the most heinous of crimes,” he said. “The people of Tennessee expect that those sentences will be carried out in a manner that is not only legal, and constitutional, but effective and that didn’t happen and I’m highly disappointed along with Tennesseans about what happened last night.”

Lee is not seeking reelection this fall. But the Republican front-runner to replace him, Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn, appeared to be most interested in finding another method for euthanasia. “While there should be a........

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