Christa Pike has been on death row for more than 30 years. This week, the state of Tennessee finally tried to kill her. It failed. Pike, who was sentenced to death in 1996 for the murder of Colleen Slemmer, remains critically ill. If Pike survives, should she face another execution attempt? Whether or not she does, what is to say that another attempt won’t also fail? I don’t see that doctors like me have any particular insights into the rights and wrongs of judicial killing; the question is political. But we are well placed to ask a different question: just why is America so bad at killing people?

The United States has tried to make execution look medical, and failed

The United States has tried to make execution look medical, and failed

Earlier this year, Tennessee also failed to execute Tony Carruthers, who was convicted of kidnapping and murdering three people in 1994, after bungled attempts to secure the necessary intravenous access. Getting a drip into someone’s vein reliably is a rite of passage for newly qualified doctors. For a year, I couldn’t sit on a bus without appraising veins on the hands and forearms of other passengers. As registrar for medicine or intensive care, I was the sort of junior doctor that others called on when they struggled. The trickiest patients were intravenous (IV) drug abusers, whose toxic self-injections had destroyed most of........

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