Everything You’ve Been Told About Lethal Injection Is a Lie
Mother Jones · L · trust 46/100
An execution vigil for death row prisoner Rodrigo Hernandez in Houston, Texas, January 26, 2012. Mayra Beltran/Houston Chronicle/Getty
In the months leading up to Christa Pike’s execution date, she and her legal team made it clear that she, the lone woman on Tennessee’s death row, 50 years old, wasn’t afraid to die. She was terrified of the execution itself .
“Her greatest fear wasn’t dying,” attorney Stephen Ferrell told USA Today in a press conference. “It was a fear of a prolonged, painful, traumatic death.”
Citing her blood-clotting disorder and a history of difficult blood draws, her attorney argued that there could be problems properly affixing the IV into Pike’s arm and that executing her via lethal injection would amount to cruel and unusual punishment.
About a month before her execution, her lawyers had pushed for her to be hanged or shot by a firing squad instead. At the eleventh hour, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals stayed her execution, only to have the Supreme Court overrule it. When she finally arrived in the prison’s death chamber, Pike and her lawyer’s concerns would be proven true to a degree they couldn’t have anticipated: she became the first person to survive the administration of a double dose of lethal injection drugs.
What should have been a ten- to twenty-minute process took two hours, according to the Associated Press, and ended with Pike alive but in critical condition. Christa Pike reportedly remains intubated, on a ventilator in a Nashville hospital, receiving life-saving care after being pumped with what should have been two fatal doses of pentobarbital, a barbiturate used by many states for lethal injection. When she arrived at the hospital, Pike’s arms were “swollen, burned and blistered,” according to an emergency filing from her legal team.
There’s still a lot that we don’t know about the actions of prison officials leading up to and during Pike’s execution. Pike’s attorneys believe that a problem with the state’s IV lines caused the pentobarbital to flow into her tissue, instead of her veins.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has halted all executions in the state and ordered an “independent investigation.” The head of Tennessee’s Department of Correction resigned days after Pike’s hospitalization, but defended the execution, saying the state “carried out its responsibilities in accordance with the established protocol.”
Christa Pike’s case, while unusual in many respects, is a perfect encapsulation of the pitfalls of lethal injection as an execution method in the United States. Most people’s understanding of lethal injection—as a humane alternative to more overtly brutal executions of yore—is in stark contrast to the actual barbarism behind the procedure. This misconception is no coincidence: it’s by design.
Death penalty states are incredibly secretive about every step of the lethal injection process. Why? According to University of Richmond law professor and former prosecutor Corinna Barrett Lain, it’s because lethal injection has the best political optics—as long as people don’t know much about what’s happening behind the scenes.
As Lain wrote in her 2025 book , Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection :
Every other execution method—hanging, the electric chair, gas chamber, and firing squad—lays bare the brutality of the state that kills in our name. Lethal injection hides it. With lethal injection, we don’t have to deal with the sight of blood, or the smell of burning flesh, or the sounds of suffering, all potent reminders of what the state is actually doing. Instead, we get to tell ourselves that prisoners are just drifting off into forever-sleep.
Secrets of the Killing State pulls back the curtain that shrouds lethal injection, revealing how everything from the drug suppliers to the science behind this method of execution is riddled with issues. I reached out to Lain to learn what might have gone wrong in Pike’s execution, and how the problems with lethal injection are not individual but systemic, baked into its very foundation.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What was your initial reaction to hearing about the failed execution of Christa Pike?
Yet another botched execution. I had some ideas of how it happened, why it happened, but of course, part of the problem is we don’t have any information. I’ve been studying [lethal injection] for seven years, so hearing about Christa, it’s really sad and frustrating.
“For the first 35 to 40 years, states used a paralytic…that would ensure it would look like putting down a pet.”
You know, in some ways, her case is a paradigm example of both everything that’s wrong with lethal injection and everything that’s wrong with the death penalty. More broadly, it’s an example of what’s wrong with lethal injection.
We now have a growing list of people whose executions are so badly botched that they survived their own execution. But we also know we’ve seen executions that are one hour long, two hours long, three hours long. I’ve seen autopsies with 14, 16, 18 puncture wounds. This is the stuff that’s been happening, but now, finally, it has drawn the public’s attention.
In your book, you spend a good chunk of the beginning pulling back the curtain on the real horrors that come with lethal injection and how execution states have pretty brilliantly rebranded it. Can you describe people’s biggest misconceptions when it comes to the death penalty vs. the actual reality of the procedure?
The public has been told for the last 45 years that lethal injection is akin to putting your beloved pet down, and none of that’s true. The public has been sold a bill of goods, and for the first 35 to 40 years, states used a paralytic as one of the drugs in lethal injection that would ensure it would look like putting down a pet.
The paralytic was also a muscle relaxant, so it relaxed all the muscles in the face, and then it froze them that way. So you’re going to get this nice…
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