Christa Pike spent over an hour helping Tennessee's execution team find a vein. She pointed to spots on her body, thanked them for their efforts, and cooperated fully with the people trying to kill her. The drug never reached her bloodstream. She is now the only person ever to survive a full lethal injection execution, awake and walking in a Nashville hospital with grotesquely swollen arms. The Pike debacle is not an isolated malfunction. It sits inside a sharp reversal of a two-decade decline in US executions. From a low of 11 judicial killings in 2021, the count surged to 47 in 2025 — the highest in 16 years. Florida alone executed 19 people last year under Ron DeSantis and has already killed 16 in 2026. Nationwide, up to 38 executions are expected this year, the most since 2013. The engine behind this resurgence is straightforwardly political. Donald Trump executed 13 federal prisoners at the end of his first term, issued a day-one executive order on "restoring the death penalty" upon return, and this week ordered the military firing-squad execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the 3 December execution will be public — the first since 1936 — and livestreamed, prompting the UN to issue the same torture warning it gives Afghanistan and Iran. Trump's own Justice Department has concluded there is no proof capital punishment deters crime. By conservative estimates, 4% of death row inmates are innocent. These facts have not slowed the apparatus. The political incentive structure rewards visible punishment: DeSantis set execution records, Marsha Blackburn — the Republican candidate for Tennessee governor — responded to Pike's botched injection by calling for the return of the electric chair. Christian nationalism provides the ideological fuel. Brooklyn Walker, an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, has found Christian nationalists far more embracing of retributive justice than other US religious groups. Idaho pastor Doug Wilson, with close ties to Hegseth, wants legal appeals streamlined to speed executions. Texas pastor Joel Webbon has argued the death penalty should cover women who make false sexual assault accusations and posted to 120,000 followers that "you cannot be pro life without being pro death penalty." The lethal injection protocol itself is unraveling. Pike's case is the most dramatic failure, but the broader pattern is one of pharmaceutical companies refusing to supply drugs, states turning to compounding pharmacies and untested combinations, and execution teams struggling with basic IV access. The method chosen to look clinical and humane is producing outcomes that are neither. Abolitionist Laura Porter calls this "death by a thousand cuts" — each botched execution, each wrongful conviction, each intellectually disabled person killed eroding public tolerance. But the counter-trend is real: political actors are treating executions as performance, spectacle, and loyalty signal. The question is no longer whether the system works. It is whether the people running it care.
