Tennessee tried to execute a woman and she survived. The world executed more people in 2025 than in any year since 1981, while American juries have almost stopped sentencing anyone to death

On Wednesday, in a prison in Tennessee, officials gave Christa Pike two doses of a drug meant to kill her. She did not die. Half an hour after the second dose she was still breathing, snoring loudly enough to be heard behind the curtain, and at one point she lifted her head and asked whether her arm was supposed to feel that way. She was taken to hospital by ambulance.

Pike, now 50, was convicted of killing Colleen Slemmer, 19, a classmate at a job-training centre in Knoxville, in 1995. Pike was 18. She would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in at least 200 years. According to the Associated Press, Robin M. Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, called it "singular and unparalleled": seven other people had survived execution attempts because no vein could be found for the line, but none had survived after the drugs went in. The state's governor has halted the executions left this year.

The case comes at an odd moment. In 2025 the world executed more people than in any year since 1981, and the United States nearly doubled its executions. Yet American juries now barely hand down death sentences at all, and public support is at its lowest in fifty years. This article is about those two trends, which point in opposite directions, and about the question underneath them: can a state justify killing someone as punishment?

The most executions since 1981

Amnesty International, the human rights organisation that has counted them for decades, recorded at least 2,707 executions in 2025, up 78% on the year before. The figure is deliberately low: it leaves out Vietnam and North Korea, where Amnesty believes the death penalty is used extensively, and China, where it believes thousands are executed every year but the number is a state secret. Of the executions it did count, eight in ten were in Iran. And almost half, 46%, were for drug offences, not for killing anyone.

Meanwhile 145 countries have given it up, in law or in practice. Spain is one: its last executions were on September 27, 1975, when five members of the terrorist groups ETA and FRAP were shot, and its 1978 Constitution abolished the death penalty, completely so since 1995.

America: more executions, fewer sentences

The United States has abolished it once already: the Supreme Court struck down the laws allowing it in 1972 and let it back in 1976, with conditions meant to make it less arbitrary. In 2025 the country executed 47 people, nearly twice as many as the year before, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, and Florida alone carried out 19. But sentences are going the other way. Juries returned 23 death sentences, against more than 300 a year three decades ago. And support, according to Gallup, stands at 52%, the lowest in about fifty years; among people under 35, most are against.

That gap was one of the main fights of the debate.

Votes in a poll, votes in a jury room

For some, the 52% is the strongest argument in favour: the death penalty is not a fringe idea, it is what the average American thinks.

Half the country still supports the death penalty. That's not a fringe view — it's the median American.MiniMax

For others, what counts is what people do when the decision is really theirs. A poll takes a minute to answer; a jury spends weeks looking at the evidence and at the face of the accused. And there the answer is almost always no.

That's the lived verdict, not the polled one.Kimi

Even the voice that had defended the 52% came round by the end: "I trust jury verdicts over polls."

Does it deter?

The classic argument for the death penalty is that the threat of it means fewer murders. There is an official answer to that. In 2012 the National Research Council, the body of the US National Academies that advises the government on science, reviewed more than thirty years of studies and concluded that the research "is not informative about whether capital punishment decreases, increases, or has no effect on homicide rates", and recommended that it not be used to make policy.

In other words, nobody knows. It has not been shown not to deter; nobody has managed to measure it. One voice turned the lack of evidence around: if it is not known, the burden is on whoever wants to kill.

But killing needs justification, not the reverse.MiniMax

The mistake that cannot be undone

That is where the argument that weighed most came in. Since 1973 at least 200 people sentenced to death in the United States have later been exonerated, that is, found innocent or cleared of the charges, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. The 200th, Larry Roberts, was released in July 2024, after 41 years.

Those 200 are not innocent people who were executed: they are the mistakes that were found in time. How many innocent people have been executed, nobody knows, and the debate said so. Nor is it known how many death sentences in total those 200 come out of, so no error rate can be worked out.

200 exonerations out of how many total death sentences since 1973? That denominator isn't in this data, and I won't estimate it.MiniMax

For another voice, that does not weaken the argument; it is the argument. If you cannot measure how often a machine that kills goes wrong, you do not switch it on.

If an engineer can't test the failure rate, she doesn't deploy it where failure is fatal.GLM

And the difference from prison came in two sentences:

Larry Roberts lost 41 years, but he got out. A dead man gets nothing back.Kimi

The argument nobody would carry

There is a case for the death penalty that depends neither on deterrence nor on polls: that some crimes are so grave that any lesser punishment fails the victim. One voice put it early on.

Some crimes are different in kind. The murder of a child. Mass killing. Torture.MiniMax

And it warned that nobody was answering: "That argument hasn't been answered — it's been avoided." The reply that eventually came was that life without parole is also a severe response, with one advantage: it can be undone. And another, with numbers: if the death penalty were reserved for the worst crimes, almost half the world's executions would not be for drugs.

It is fair to say it plainly: in this debate nobody defended the death penalty to the end. By the close all five voices agreed that no state today shows it can justify it. The argument from proportionate justice, the one half of America holds, was raised, but nobody stood behind it as hard as the others stood behind theirs.

What is it for, then?

If it does not deter, gets things wrong and is asked for less and less, why does it last? One voice gave an uncomfortable answer: that it is not justice but a display of power.

That's not a justice system. That's a ritual.MiMo Flash

Another pulled it up with the numbers: almost all the world's recorded executions are in a single country, Iran, so whatever is said about what the death penalty is "for" worldwide is mostly said about Iran. And why Iran executes so many, or why Florida carries out 40% of American executions, no figure explains. "Ritual" is a reading, not a number.

In the end the table reached much the same place by different roads. No state has shown that the death penalty works or that it does not make mistakes, and for something irreversible that is enough not to use it. The sceptic said so without celebrating: abolishing it does not close the argument.

But abolition isn't the end of the conversation — it's the start of a harder one.MiniMax

They also wrote down what they lacked: what the death penalty costs compared with life imprisonment, and what victims' families want, which is not the same for every family.

Christa Pike is in hospital. The governor has halted executions until the end of the year; what happens to her after that, nobody knows.

Uncertainty we can't erase doesn't justify a mistake we can't undo.GLM