Christa Pike Survived Her Own Execution. Does the Death Penalty Serve Any Purpose?
Tennessee gave Christa Pike two doses of pentobarbital and failed to kill her. In the night of September 30 to October 1, 2026, the condemned woman was taken from the execution chamber to a hospital; Governor Bill Lee halted the state’s executions for the rest of the year and ordered an independent review. It is a fitting moment to ask not about emotions but about evidence: what science knows about whether the death penalty deters, whether it brings relief to victims’ families, how often it reaches the innocent, and whom it actually serves.
The Execution of Christa Pike: What Is Known and What Is Not
Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, Nashville, Wednesday, September 30. The execution was set for ten in the morning, but shortly before that hour the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit stayed it by a vote of two to one, in order to resolve a procedural question: whether Pike’s motion to reopen her federal proceedings, built on the full picture of her childhood (rape and violence from her earliest years, which Tennessee did not dispute at the August hearing and which never reached the sentencing jury in full), could be heard at all, or whether it was an impermissible second habeas petition. In the afternoon the Supreme Court vacated the stay; Justice Sotomayor dissented, joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson. In the evening Pike was strapped to the gurney.
What followed is known from media witnesses and from the defense filings. The execution team administered two syringes of pentobarbital. The curtain separating the witnesses from the chamber came down twice. Her lawyers told the court that she had not lost consciousness, still had a heartbeat and was audibly snoring; witnesses confirmed she was breathing when they were ordered to leave the building. Late in the evening Pike was taken away by ambulance. The Department of Correction confirmed that she had been transported to an off-site medical facility and stated that every step required by the protocol had been carried out; that is an institution’s position, not a finding on the cause. Around midnight local time Governor Lee announced that the one remaining execution scheduled in Tennessee this year would not take place and that an independent third party would examine what had happened. Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, called the night unprecedented.
What is not known: why the drug did not work. The defense speaks of difficult vein access, “blown” veins and degraded pentobarbital, but these are one party’s hypotheses. A redacted version of the execution protocol is public, but the records of this particular attempt, meaning the IV documentation, the drug lot and its storage conditions, and toxicology, have not been released. That is worth remembering before commentators on both sides of the dispute settle the matter on the experts’ behalf.
The context is heavier than the evening itself. Pike was 18 when, in 1995 in Knoxville, she murdered 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a fellow student in the Job Corps program; she was sentenced to death in 1996. She spent thirty years on death row, since 2010, when the governor commuted Gaile Owens’s sentence, as the only woman there in Tennessee, and she was to be the first woman executed in the state in more than two centuries. Her diagnoses of bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder came only in prison; the forensic psychologist Bethany Brand documented in her evaluation the scale of the violence the condemned woman endured as a child. A special master appointed by the Tennessee Supreme Court, in a report of August 20, and then the Court itself, in an order of September 23, held that the arguments about her thrombocytosis, difficult vein access and the risk of re-traumatization did not justify a stay. Four months earlier, on May 21, 2026, the same state had spent more than an hour failing to establish the backup IV line its protocol requires in Tony Carruthers, although the primary line had been placed, after which the governor granted him a one-year reprieve. A state that had spent three decades proving in court that it could kill humanely found, at the decisive moment, that it could not kill at all.
Does the Death Penalty Deter? What Has Actually Been Established
The deterrence argument is the oldest and, intuitively, the strongest: if people fear death, the threat of execution ought to restrain at least some would-be killers. It deserves to be taken seriously, because if it is true, executions save lives, and giving them up has a body count of its own.
The difficulty is that in fifty years no one has managed to demonstrate it. In 1975 the economist Isaac Ehrlich estimated that each execution prevented seven or eight murders, and that study was invoked in the dispute that ended with the reinstatement of capital punishment in Gregg v. Georgia (1976). Three years later a National Research Council panel concluded that the available studies offered no useful evidence. The wave of econometric work in the 2000s produced even more striking figures: Mocan and Gittings calculated that each execution meant five fewer homicides and each commutation five more; Joanna Shepherd found that deterrence appeared only in a handful of states carrying out roughly nine or more executions in the study period, while in a group of states more than twice as large, executions tended to increase homicides. Then Donohue and Wolfers showed that minor changes to the specification of the very same models yielded results ranging from 429 lives saved to 86 lives lost per execution. A model that proves either thesis depending on its settings proves neither.
The verdict came in 2012 from the National Research Council committee chaired by Daniel Nagin and John Pepper: the research to date is not informative about whether capital punishment decreases, increases or has no effect on homicide, and it should not be used to inform decisions that require a judgment about the death penalty’s effect on homicide. The committee was careful to add that this was not an argument for either side. The reasons are methodological: nationwide, executions are so rare that any effect vanishes in the noise; the models fail to account for what punishment awaits a murderer instead of death (usually life without parole); and no one knows how potential offenders perceive the risk of execution.
More recent work has changed the methods without changing the picture. A synthetic control analysis of the moratoria in Illinois, New Jersey, Washington and Pennsylvania (Criminology and Public Policy, 2022) found no deterrent effect: halting executions did not raise homicide rates. The most interesting natural experiment, however, was supplied by history. Daniel Chen of the Toulouse School of Economics examined more than three thousand death sentences handed down by the British Army during the First World War, of which about 12 percent were carried out; soldiers did not know that the remaining 88 percent would be quietly commuted, so they perceived the risk as uniformly high, and which man would face the firing squad was decided, de facto, by lottery. The result, published in 2025 in the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, is this: executions did not strongly deter subsequent desertions, and among Irish soldiers desertions rose after a compatriot was shot, which Chen attributes to the weaker legitimacy the British command held in their eyes. Severity without legitimacy breeds not obedience but defiance. Findings from the trenches cannot simply be transplanted to peacetime homicide, but criminology has been making the same observation for years in a different vocabulary: behavior responds above all to the certainty of punishment, far less to its severity, and least is known about the role of swiftness.
The opposite hypothesis, known as the brutalization effect, rests on evidence just as uncertain. Bowers and Pierce found in 57 years of New York data an increase of two or three homicides in the months following executions; Shepherd’s and Chen’s findings point the same way, but these are conditional effects, dependent on context and method. An honest summary runs as follows. It is certain that no study meeting scientific standards has demonstrated a deterrent effect. It is probable, though this is a conclusion drawn from the literature as a whole rather than a finding of any single study, that the marginal effect of the death penalty over life imprisonment is close to zero. It is uncertain whether executions, under some conditions, increase violence.
What an Execution Gives the Victims’ Families
The second argument is moral and emotional: the families of the murdered have a right to justice and to “closure.” Here, too, there are data, though fewer, because for a long time nobody asked the families.
The most important study was conducted by Marilyn Armour of the University of Texas and Mark Umbreit of the University of Minnesota, who compared randomly selected families of homicide victims in Texas, where the ultimate sanction is death, with those in Minnesota, where it is life without parole (Marquette Law Review, 2012). The sample was small, 39 randomly selected survivors, and the authors themselves note its limitations, but no one had asked the families this way before. Years later, the Minnesota families were in better physical and psychological health. What proved decisive was not the severity of the sentence but the survivors’ sense of control over the process: in Minnesota the appeals ended within about two years and the case left the family’s life, whereas in Texas they dragged on for decades, adding layer upon layer of powerlessness. Judy Eaton and Anna Christensen, in turn, analyzed the statements family members gave the press immediately after executions (International Review of Victimology, 2014): only 23 percent mentioned closure at all, and those were evenly divided between people for whom the execution had provided it and those for whom it had not. An analysis of press accounts of 138 executions between 2006 and 2011 produced a similar picture: 31 percent of family members spoke of closure or a step toward it, and 35 percent of justice. Silence in front of a reporter does not prove the absence of relief, but it refutes the claim that relief is the rule. Colleen Slemmer’s family waited thirty years for an execution and, instead of an ending, received another chapter. If the Armour and Umbreit findings hold up in larger samples, the death penalty does not so much give families justice as take their time.
The Psychology of Punishment: Why Evidence Persuades No One
If the deterrence argument has no support in the data, why is it still advanced? Social psychology has a well-documented answer. In a series of experiments, Kevin Carlsmith, John Darley and Paul Robinson (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2002) showed that people profess support for punishment as an instrument of prevention, yet when they assign punishment in concrete cases they are guided almost exclusively by just deserts: by the gravity of the act and the culpability of the offender, not by whether the sentence will deter anyone. Later studies on nationally representative samples confirmed the gap between words and actions. A review in the Annual Review of Law and Social Science puts it plainly: the reaction to a crime is an intuitive, emotionally charged moral outrage, and the utilitarian arguments are attached afterward.
The conclusion is uncomfortable for both camps. Deterrence is, to a large extent, a rationalization of the need for retribution, so showing that there is no evidence for it changes little. And conversely: support for the death penalty is not a cognitive error to be corrected with data but an expression of a moral intuition that must be argued with on its own ground. In 1972 Justice Thurgood Marshall advanced the thesis that citizens informed of the facts would reject the death penalty; subsequent American research, pursued over decades by Robert Bohm among others, found that information lowers support only among some people, and least among those for whom retribution itself is what matters. Four preregistered Japanese experiments published in 2023 did not confirm that last claim: information about wrongful convictions moved retributivists there as much as everyone else. Legal culture makes a difference here too.
Against that background, American opinion is shifting nonetheless. Gallup measured support for the death penalty in October 2025 at 52 percent, the lowest in five decades, and opposition at 44 percent, the highest since 1966; among adults under 35 support stands at 41 percent, among Republicans at 81 percent, among Democrats at 32 percent. When Gallup forced a choice between the two punishments in 2019, 60 percent chose life without parole and 36 percent the death penalty.
There is also the psychology of those who carry out the sentence. Michael Osofsky, Albert Bandura and Philip Zimbardo studied the staff of three penitentiaries and described how members of execution teams draw on the full repertoire of moral disengagement mechanisms Bandura described: diffusion of responsibility through the division of labor (each has only a small role on the team), dehumanization of the condemned, moral and economic justification. A more recent analysis of execution team members’ accounts (The Prison Journal, 2021) suggests that the procedures meant to shield them from the burden succeed only in part. The authors took one team member’s remark, that “it’s not gonna leave any scars,” as their title, for reasons that are easy to guess.
The Risk of Error, or One Person in Twenty-Five
The hardest data concern mistakes. Samuel Gross and his co-authors applied to the death sentences of 1973 to 2004 a survival analysis borrowed from clinical research and estimated in PNAS that if everyone sentenced between 1973 and 2004 had remained on death row long enough, at least 4.1 percent would have been exonerated; they call this a conservative estimate and stress that it concerns those sentenced to death, not those executed. Not because the death penalty attracts more errors, but because in capital cases the state and the defense invest incomparably more effort in uncovering them. According to the Death Penalty Information Center’s database, since 1973 at least 203 people sentenced to death have been legally exonerated; for every eight people executed, one has been exonerated, which is a ratio of two sets, not the share of the innocent among those executed. In nearly 70 percent of the 185 cases covered by DPIC’s report, misconduct by police or prosecutors was found; DNA testing was decisive only in a minority, and the rest turned, often simultaneously, on false accusations, recanted testimony and discredited forensic evidence. Not every exoneration means proven innocence, but each means the sentence should never have been imposed.
From a lawyer’s standpoint, what matters here is asymmetry. With a life sentence, an error can be partly repaired; with an execution, it cannot be repaired at all. A system that research into its own verdicts shows to err in a few percent of cases, and nonetheless chooses the irreversible penalty, is making a decision about risk, not about justice.
The Technique of Killing: Why the Injection Fails
Lethal injection, first used in 1982, was to be the medical method, clean and painless. The trouble is that physicians, as a rule, refuse to take part, pharmaceutical manufacturers refuse to supply, and states buy pentobarbital from compounding pharmacies under the cover of secrecy statutes. Austin Sarat of Amherst College examined 8,776 executions carried out between 1890 and 2010 and classified 3.15 percent as botched, meaning marred by unanticipated problems or departures from procedure, not necessarily survived, with lethal injection, at 7.12 percent, faring worse than the electric chair and the gallows. Critics such as Michael Conklin object that his definition is so broad that it includes the prisoner’s resistance and a curtain opened too early; the dispute over definitions does not, however, remove the named and documented cases of prolonged agony that DPIC keeps on record. In 2022 DPIC classified seven of twenty execution attempts in the United States, 35 percent, as visibly problematic, including three each in Arizona and Alabama.
More important than counting incidents are the autopsies. A review of 43 autopsy reports of prisoners executed with midazolam or with pentobarbital alone, released as a preprint in 2022, found acute pulmonary edema, often with froth filling the airways, in roughly 80 percent of cases, and for pentobarbital in 10 of 15. In a conscious person, pulmonary edema produces the sensation of drowning; an autopsy alone does not prove that a particular prisoner was conscious at the time, but witnesses behind the glass cannot settle that question either, so a “peaceful” execution is no proof of a peaceful death. Defense lawyers in Tennessee point to the autopsy of Byron Black, executed in August 2025, which also found pulmonary edema. The United States Supreme Court answered such arguments as early as 2019, in Bucklew v. Precythe: the Eighth Amendment does not guarantee a prisoner a painless death, and a prisoner who challenges a method must himself identify a feasible alternative that would significantly reduce the risk of severe pain. So the states look for alternatives: Alabama introduced nitrogen hypoxia in 2024, and South Carolina shot three prisoners by firing squad in 2025, all of whom had chosen the method themselves. Each new technique promised what the previous one had.
The Sociology of the Death Penalty: Whom and What It Serves
If the death penalty does not deter, helps families less often than assumed, errs in a few percent of cases and fails technically with increasing frequency, the question remains why it endures. The answer the sociology of punishment has given, from Durkheim to Garland, is that it serves not so much crime control as communication. Durkheim already wrote that punishment serves primarily neither to reform the offender nor to deter imitators, but to sustain the collective conscience of the community that imposes it. David Garland of New York University, in Peculiar Institution (Harvard University Press, 2010), showed that the American death penalty survived thanks to a radically local democracy: European elites abolished it from above, often against public opinion, while American elites, at least in the states that have kept it, cannot and will not, because prosecutors and many judges are elected, and an execution is a politician’s cheapest proof of resolve. For half a century the federal courts tried to civilize the mechanism, producing layers of procedure, delay and reversal, until a system emerged in which a fraction of those sentenced are executed, after a wait of fifteen, twenty or thirty years.
The data of the past two years fit a political logic, not a criminological one. In 2025 the United States executed 47 people, the most in sixteen years, and by September 29, 2026, another 29, even as new death sentences decline and juries impose them ever more rarely. Worldwide, Amnesty International recorded 2,707 executions in 2025, the most since 1981, including 2,159 in Iran and at least 356 in Saudi Arabia; 46 percent were for drug offenses, and the figures exclude China. Seventeen countries carried out executions, ten of them in every one of the past five years; 113 countries have abolished the death penalty entirely and 145 in law or in practice, joined in August 2026 by Lebanon, the first country in the Middle East. Executions rise where power needs a signal of strength, not where crime rises; that is an interpretation, but none of the figures cited contradicts it.
There is a paradox in this, and it is plainly visible in Nashville. The harder a state tries to make the death penalty fair and humane, the slower, costlier and rarer it becomes. A cost review prepared in 2025 for the Indiana legislature put a capital trial at eight times the cost of a trial seeking life without parole, and in other states a capital case costs between one and three million dollars more than a case seeking life. That money is the price of safeguards against error; it can be cut, but then the share of the innocent rises. Christa Pike spent thirty years on death row, and the European Court of Human Rights held as early as 1989, in Soering v. the United Kingdom, that the prospect of years on death row in mounting anguish, assessed together with the prisoner’s personal circumstances, crosses the threshold of inhuman treatment under Article 3 of the Convention. The American system can neither kill quickly nor give up killing; hence a ritual that ends, more and more often, with an ambulance.
The Death Penalty in Poland: A Subject That Returns After Every Crime
Poland carried out its last execution on April 21, 1988, at the Montelupich prison in Kraków; Andrzej Czabański, convicted of rape and murder, was hanged. The courts went on imposing death sentences until 1996; a 1995 amendment restored life imprisonment to the code and introduced a formal moratorium on executions, and the Penal Code of 1997 (Kodeks karny), in force since September 1, 1998, removed the death penalty from the catalogue of punishments. Article 38 of the Constitution of 1997 guarantees every person the legal protection of life; Poland has been a party to Protocol No. 6 to the European Convention on Human Rights since 2000 and to Protocol No. 13, abolishing the death penalty in all circumstances, since September 1, 2014 (Journal of Laws of 2014, item 1155). Since July 25, 2014, Poland has also been bound by the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (Journal of Laws of 2014, item 891), and, within the scope of EU law, by Article 2 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights. Protocol No. 13 admits neither reservations nor derogations, the Second Optional Protocol has no denunciation clause, and the UN Human Rights Committee, in General Comment No. 36 of 2018, takes the position that a state which has abolished the death penalty may not reintroduce it, because abolition is legally irrevocable.
That is an interpretive view, not a judgment, but one detail from the drafting is telling: it was Poland that proposed deleting the notion of irrevocability. Reinstating the death penalty would therefore require not an amendment to the code but a breach of treaty obligations, which cannot be reconciled with membership of the Council of Europe or the European Union. Political declarations on the subject are therefore a message, not a bill, and in that sense they confirm Durkheim’s thesis. It is worth adding that since October 1, 2023, Polish law has known life imprisonment without the possibility of parole (Article 77 §§ 3 and 4 of the Penal Code). The dispute over the ultimate penalty does not end with abolition: in Vinter and Others v. the United Kingdom (2013), the European Court of Human Rights held that a life sentence with no real prospect of review may itself violate Article 3 of the Convention, and the Polish construction still awaits that test.
Public opinion is more interesting here than the law, because it shows how much depends on how the question is asked. In surveys by CBOS, the Polish public opinion research center, acceptance of the death penalty for the gravest crimes reached 77 percent in 1999, 2000 and 2004 and fell to 63 percent in 2007, as the sense of public safety grew; the center itself notes that the wording of the question changed over the years. Yet when the IBRiS institute asked in January 2023 whether respondents agreed with the then prime minister, who had come out in favor of reinstating it, 38.7 percent were in favor and 54.1 percent against; the gap reflects partly a different question, partly sixteen years and a different political context. Abstract acceptance, support for a specific change in the law, and readiness to defend it after a notorious miscarriage of justice are three different quantities; polls usually measure the first, and politicians quote it as if it were the third. Poland also knows its own variant of the mechanism Garland described for America: support for the death penalty rises after shocking crimes and subsides when the media change the subject; the observation is commonplace among pollsters, though rarely measured before and after a specific event.
The Balance Sheet: Does the Death Penalty Serve Any Purpose
The question in the title can be answered without sympathy for either side. As an instrument for preventing homicide, the death penalty has no demonstrated effectiveness; after five decades of research, the most authoritative scientific body in the field concluded that it is not even known in which direction it works. As a form of help for victims’ families, it gives less than it promises and often takes more than it gives. As justice, it is a moral claim that data can neither confirm nor refute, but one that must reckon with two quantities: an estimated four percent rate of wrongful death sentences and the irreversibility of execution. As a technical practice, it fails more often than the state admits, and more often than witnesses are able to see.
There remains the strongest of the utilitarian arguments, incapacitation: an executed prisoner will never kill again. True, except that life without parole achieves the same result, and the difference comes down to prison violence and escapes, phenomena that are rare and measurable. The incapacitation argument therefore justifies confinement, not execution.
What, then, does it serve? It serves a community that wants to say that some acts are unforgivable, and politicians who want to say so on its behalf. That function is real, and for a sociologist it is the most important one. It only needs to be called by its name: the death penalty is a message, not a security policy. In Tennessee that message sounded resolute on Monday, when the governor denied clemency; on Wednesday evening it turned into the siren of an ambulance. The independent review may answer the question of what went wrong with the veins and the drug. The question of what it serves, the social sciences answered long ago; the answer is simply less convenient than either side of the dispute would like to hear.
Robert Nogacki is a Polish attorney at law (radca prawny), the founder and managing partner of Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec (Skarbiec Law Firm), which has operated continuously since 2006.
The law is equal for everyone, but the parties rarely are: on one side stands an organization with time, money, and lawyers, on the other a person with one business, one nest egg, and one life.
Clients rarely come to him with a legal problem. They come with a problem that also has a legal side: an audit that began with a single invoice, money entrusted to someone who has disappeared, a company that has to be passed on before it is too late. Most such matters are decided long before the first letter is written, in decisions made without asking and in deadlines nobody remembered. So he begins by asking how the client got here, not what the client should have done.
He advises entrepreneurs and families from more than a dozen countries, including those whose accounts the tax office has just seized and who do not know what to do tomorrow morning. He defends them in tax audits, customs and fiscal inspections, disputes with the tax authorities, and criminal tax proceedings. He represents victims of investment fraud and Ponzi schemes. He helps families set up family foundations and plan succession, so that a life’s work outlasts a single generation.
Not every case can be won. Every case can be run so that the client knows where they stand. Since 2006 he has represented the victims in the WGI case (Warszawska Grupa Inwestycyjna, the Warsaw Investment Group), one of the longest criminal cases in the history of the Polish financial market, because some things must not be left half finished, even when they take two decades. In the case of the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange Zonda (Zondacrypto, operated by BB Trade Estonia OÜ), he represents several hundred victims in the criminal investigation conducted by Poland’s National Prosecutor’s Office and in the Estonian bankruptcy proceedings.
Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec is listed in the rankings of Poland’s largest tax advisory firms published by Dziennik Gazeta Prawna and Rzeczpospolita, and it is a four-time recipient (2015 to 2018) of the European Medal awarded by the Business Centre Club and the European Economic and Social Committee. Robert Nogacki publishes regularly, in the press and on the firm’s website, for people who have a problem rather than a law degree, because a legal opinion the client cannot understand protects only the lawyer.
He believes that the best legal advice is the kind that means the client never has to appear in court.
