There’s No Good Way to Execute a Person

Regardless of anyone’s specific opinion on the moral and ethical grounds of capital punishment as a deterrent or an act of state barbarism, the fact of the matter is this: the actual, mechanical process of killing a convicted criminal should not, in theory, be particularly difficult. Life is tenuous; it can take surprisingly little to rob us of it. In theory, it should be extremely simple to provide a painless death to someone who has been sentenced to die, to carry out a sentence. But there are so many complications; so many extenuating circumstances and factors related to ethics, commerce and industry, that actually killing a person in a prison setting, via the legal methods available, can become incredibly challenging. It’s perfectly logical to ask why executions seem to be botched so often; actually finding out the reasons why is more likely to make you question whether we should be doing them at all.

Case in point: A Thursday morning attempted (and failed) execution this week in Tennessee, where the state intended to put to death a man named Tony Carruthers, who was convicted of three 1994 murders, although his legal representation have argued ever since that he was wrongfully convicted. This particular execution already would have been a bit of an oddity, as the seemingly mentally unsound Carruthers would reportedly have become the first American in more than a century to be executed after having represented himself at a trial. According to his representation, Carruthers’ mental illnesses “continue to impair his understanding of his legal situation and his impending execution.” But if we can set aside for a moment the question of whether someone in Carruthers’ situation should be eligible for the death penalty, let’s focus on what actually happened to the guy on Thursday.

Which is this: Prison staff members attempted to carry out the execution by lethal injection, but after hours of trying they were forced to call it off after being unable to find a vein to administer the deadly cocktail of drugs. The Tennessee State Department of Corrections eventually conceded that their workers could not find a “suitable vein,” and the state’s Governor, Republican Bill Lee, stepped in with a reprieve order, delaying any further attempt at carrying out the execution for a year. Carruthers was subsequently returned to his cell.

UPDATE: Tennessee Governor Bill Lee issued a 1 year reprieve in the botched execution of Tony Carruthers.

As Tony begins healing from the torture he was subjected to today, we’re demanding that Governor Lee test the forensic evidence that was neglected by the state and could prove Tony’s innocence.

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— ACLU (@aclu.org) 2:38 PM · May 21, 2026

Can we all appreciate how deeply fucked up an experience this no doubt is for a prisoner? To lay strapped to a table or gurney, potentially for hours, while prison staff fuss with your body and attempt to find a way to humanely kill you, only to fail to do so? This is the kind of experience I would expect to hear that the CIA had used on prisoners in Guantanamo, not the kind of orderly procession of the law you’d think we would be demanding of the concept of capital punishment in a first-world country. This is part of the social contract of a nation using the death penalty: It’s inherently supposed to be as dispassionate, painless and efficient as possible rather than actively sadistic, or incompetent to the point that it becomes sadistic whether that is even intended. If you can’t competently perform executions, then what business do you have in doing them?

The obvious question here, for someone unfamiliar with the topic, is why was it so difficult in this case to find that “suitable vein”? When you go to the doctor’s office, the phlebotomist (hopefully) doesn’t struggle for hours to take a little blood for tests. Hospitals know how to set an IV; they do it hundreds or thousands of times a day. So why does it suddenly become a problem in the context of an execution? Well, the main reason is that the most experienced and competent experts in this field simply don’t want to be or ethically cannot be anywhere near the very notion of capital punishment.

Beyond the fact that doctors, nurses and EMTs have taken oaths to “do no harm,” major medical organizations like the American Medical Association and the American Nurses Association expressly forbid their members from participating in executions. This robs the process of certified and trained individuals, leaving prisons forced to rely on relatively untrained corrections staff or independent contractors who are under significant pressure themselves. This is not a great role for anyone, leading to obvious performance issues for the poor corrections staff member tasked with setting that IV line on a patient who is, by the way, probably pretty upset and stressed at the time, and potentially resisting. What do you want to do then, tell the person about to be put to death to chill out?

There are other factors as well that make this seemingly simple procedure far more difficult in the context of a prison execution. The prisoner is often on the older side, or already in poor health, given that the average time a prisoner spends on death row before execution is often more than 20 years. These older prisoners have more difficult veins to access, which have lost elasticity over time, or have in some cases been damaged or scarred by intravenous drug use. Chronic disease frequently seen in prisons, like diabetes or vascular disease, ups the degree of difficulty as well. And finally, the scenario itself and the panic of the prisoner at facing their death results in physical changes that literally make finding a vein like searching for a needle in a haystack, as massive vasoconstriction narrows the blood vessels and the body pulls blood toward the core organs in a “fight or flight” response. The veins become smaller, flatter, and harder to find or access. And that’s how you end up with a scenario like Thursday’s embarrassment in Tennessee, and the reprieve received by Tony Carruthers.

Just left Riverbend prison, where an execution vigil and a long, confusing wait eventually culminated with the news that Tony Carruthers was taken off the gurney after failed attempts to find a vein for lethal injection. A mix of relief, joy, and horror among the people outside.

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— Liliana Segura (@lilianasegura.bsky.social) 1:58 PM · May 21, 2026

This is no isolated incident. The state of Alabama suspended all of its executions for a period in 2022-2023 after multiple incidents in which officials couldn’t access the veins of prisoners, causing death penalty researchers and advocates to dub 2022 as “the year of the botched execution.” Those researchers estimated that more than a third of all the executions in 2022 were “mishandled” and “visibly problematic” on the day of the event, with several being abandoned entirely.

“As support for the death penalty has declined, we’ve been seeing more and more extreme conduct by the states that want to carry it out,” said Robert Dunham, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, at the time. “And it’s been manifest in recklessness.”

These types of problems, in addition to the always present reticence of big pharma corporations to provide their drugs for the purpose of capital punishment because they don’t want those drugs associated with death for obvious reasons, is why some states have long retained other, seemingly more barbaric methods of execution as legal. The Trump administration generated headlines this year for proclaiming that it would bring back firings squads as an available method of execution for federal death penalty cases, but the uproar obscured the fact that death by firing squad has remained on the books in five states: Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Utah, although it is infrequently used. That is, until 2025, when South Carolina executed three people by firing squad, reportedly the first killings of their kind in the United States since 2010. Would you believe that they at least partially botched those shootings as well? Overall, executions in the U.S. nearly doubled to a 16-year high of 47 (including 10 veterans!) in 2025, mostly driven by the state of Florida suddenly deciding to catch up with its pandemic-era execution backlog. They executed 19 people, good for a 40% share of all the capital punishment happening in the country in 2025.

In light of DOJ taking actions to strengthen the federal death penalty by, among other things, adding firing squad executions, here’s what the process looks like.

In 2025, SCOTUS let South Carolina conduct the first firing squad execution in 15 years courthousenews.com/supreme-cour…

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— Kelsey Reichmann (@kelseyreichmann.bsky.social) 12:25 PM · Apr 24, 2026

None of us should probably be surprised to see an uptick in executions during the second Trump administration; not in an era where the very concept of empathy has been actively beaten out of one half of our two party system. Nevertheless, it feels almost inevitable that the era of capital punishment should be drawing to some sort of close, given the steady collapse in public support for it on a fundamental level. As recently as the mid-1990s, Gallup reported that 80% of Americans favored the continuation of capital punishment, at least in the abstract. Today, that number hovers close to 50%, meaning we will likely soon be a nation where the majority favors dismantling the capital punishment system entirely, drawing perhaps on practical reasons rather than purely moral ones in making that decision. After all, if we can’t even find a vein to execute a person, and something seemingly simple represents a gruesome series of hurdles that we still so often fail, then perhaps we have no business attempting those hurdles in the first place.