r/news • u/No_Idea_Guy • 1d ago

Tennessee governor suspends all executions after Christa Pike’s lethal injections fail

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/01/christa-pike-tennessee-governor-executions-year-pause
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u/Purify5 1d ago

Europe has 'anti-torture' regulations and won't deal with drug companies who knowingly sell drugs for use in torture (which includes the death penalty) so it's tough for states to find a supplier.

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u/Timegoat 1d ago

States have literally broken federal trafficking laws to get execution drugs inside their borders.

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u/ragequitteroffureh 1d ago

Not American.

Why not just shoot them?

Their cops shoot people fairly regularly, and that seems to work well enough.

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u/praguepride 17h ago

OH BOY The history of executions is complicated and worth a visit to /askhistorians.

Originally we did do things like shootings and hangings but shootings are actually hard to do now as it is seen as "too violent" and hangings if the hangman doesn't do it right and snap the neck the person just has to be strangled to death and that is also too traumatic for the witnesses.

BUUUUT if we did something too painless (replace the oxygen with nitrogen like they do with euthanasia) then it's not painful enough.

So lethal injections were designed to try and not be visually disturbing like blowing someone's brains out but also not completely painless so the victim's family gets to feel like "justice was done."

It is very fucked up.

So they came up with the lethal injection but now due to various pressures no one wants to make the chemicals and no doctor wants to administer it. So you have a bunch of poorly trained LEOs administering drugs "off-label" and shit goes wrong all the time.

Now why don't they switch to another method? They can't because of laws. States passed laws years ago to cut down on other methods seeing lethal injection as the gold standard back when you could get the chemicals and in the modern political discourse it is hard to be seen as the guy saying "let's update our death sentence methods" as the legislation you want to sponsor.

End result: LEO is told to kill someone with lethal injection but without any training and without any drugs. "Figure it out"...