Americans Love The Death Penalty
Sources
Christa Pike is awake after failed execution as her attorneys seek more information. AP. October 7, 2026. https://apnews.com/article/christa-pike-tennessee-failed-execution-court-bb47b2ff362d989f642d9f498413aed9
Glossip v. Gross, 2015. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/576/863/#tab-opinion-3428059
Oliphant, J. Baxter. Most Americans Favor the Death Penalty for Those Convicted of Murder. Pew Research Center. August 6, 2026. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2026/08/06/most-americans-favor-the-death-penalty-for-those-convicted-of-murder/
Costs. Death Penalty Information Center. Accessed October 7, 2026. https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/policy-issues/policy/costs
What To Know: Deterrence and the Death Penalty. Death Penalty Information Center. March 4, 2026. https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/what-to-know-deterrence-and-the-death-penalty
The Death Penalty: What the Data Actually Shows. Death Penalty Focus. September 2, 2026. https://deathpenalty.org/statistics/
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. 1975. https://monoskop.org/images/4/43/Foucault_Michel_Discipline_and_Punish_The_Birth_of_the_Prison_1977_1995.pdf
Habeshian, Sareen. Fort Hood attacker to be executed by firing squad - a first for US military since World War Two. BBC. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq8ezkkkrpy1o
Transcript
“On 2 March 1757 Damiens the regicide was condemned to be 'taken and conveyed in a cart, wearing nothing but a shirt, holding a torch of burning wax weighing two pounds'; then, 'the flesh will be torn from his breasts, arms, thighs and calves with red-hot pincers, his right hand, holding the knife with which he committed the said parricide, burnt with sulphur, and, on those places where the flesh will be torn away, poured molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin, wax and sulphur melted together and then his body drawn and quartered by four horses and his limbs and body consumed by fire, reduced to ashes and his ashes thrown to the winds.’
…
“Bouton, an officer of the watch, left us his account 'The sulphur was lit, but the flame was so poor that only the top skin of the hand was burnt, and that only slightly. Then the executioner, his sleeves rolled up, took the steel pincers, which had been especially made for the occasion, and which were about a foot and a half long, and pulled first at the calf of the right leg, then at the thigh, and from there at the two fleshy parts of the right arm; then at the breasts. Though a strong, sturdy fellow, this executioner found it so difficult to tear away the pieces of flesh that he set about the same spot two or three times, twisting the pincers as he did so, and what he took away formed at each part a wound about the size of a six-pound crown piece.’
'After these tearings with the pincers, Damiens, who cried out profusely, though without swearing, raised his head and looked at himself; the same executioner dipped an iron spoon in the pot containing the boiling potion, which he poured liberally over each wound. Then the ropes that were to be harnessed to the horses were attached with cords to the patient's body; the horses were then harnessed and placed alongside the arms and legs, one at each limb.’
'The horses tugged hard, each pulling straight on a limb, each horse held by an executioner. After a quarter of an hour, the same ceremony was repeated and finally, after several attempts, the direction of the horses had to be changed, thus: those at the arms were made to pull towards the head, those at the thighs towards the arms, which broke the arms at the joints. This was repeated several times without success. He raised his head and looked at himself. Two more horses had to be added to those harnessed to the thighs, which made six horses in all. Without success.”
Eventually, the executioners hacked off the accused’s limbs and set him on fire, likely all while he was still alive, finally fulfilling the directive that his ashes be thrown to the winds many many hours after the execution began.
In the roughly 270 years between the botched though ultimately successful state execution of Damiens in France and the botched state execution of Christa Pike last week in Tennessee, we as a people like to cajole ourselves into thinking we have become enlightened, far above the gory barbaric brutality of the public executions brought from Europe to the new world in America so many centuries ago. And yet opening any social media app in the last week reveals comment after comment celebrating the torture of Christa Pike at the hands of the state, wishing they took her off life support or put a quick bullet in her head, the 2026 equivalent of the brown-toothed peasant cheering as heads roll in the town square. Adding to the fervor, at the request of Pete Hegseth, this week Trump green-lit the military execution by firing squad of Nidal Hasan, the US Army psychiatrist who, in 2009, opened fire in a crowded medical building at Fort Hood in Texas, killing 13 unarmed US soldiers and injuring 32 more. His execution is scheduled for December 3rd and will be the first military execution by firing squad since World War 2.
The United States stands alone in the West and in most of the world in its use of the death penalty, firing squad or otherwise. Globally, 145 countries have abolished the death penalty in law or in practice. The US was the fourth highest executioner on the planet last year, beat only by Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. China is likely the global leader in executions, which are estimated to be carried out in the thousands every year there but the numbers are a closely held state secret and therefore China doesn’t make it on the leader boards of those organizations who track the numbers. And as happens perennially any time some state botches its latest execution attempt, Christa Pike’s failed execution has people arguing over the validity of the death penalty in the US. Do some people deserve to die? And are we really willing to give the state the power to mete out that punishment?
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While much of the rest of the world looks at what the US does carrying out the death penalty as barbaric and unfathomable, on the ground in the US the death penalty remains relatively popular. 66% of Americans somewhat or strongly favor the death penalty for people convicted of murder, with only 33% opposed to it. This includes 51% of Democrats and 84% of Republicans. This despite the fact that only 23% of Democrats believe that black and white people are equally likely to be sentenced to the death penalty. Meaning there’s a good portion of Democrats who support the death penalty despite thinking that it's disproportionately applied to black people. And, for the record, it is disproportionately applied to black people, with studies showing that race plays a role in whether someone is convicted and sentenced to death. Black people represent 13% of the general population in the US but 40% of the population on death row. Fully 70% of white people support the death penalty for murder, while 48% of black people oppose the death penalty.
At the same time, 59% of people think the death penalty does not act as a deterrent from committing serious crimes. So if 66% of the general population supports the death penalty but only 39% think it deters people from committing crimes, there’s a good chunk of people who support the death penalty even though they don’t think it acts as a crime deterrent. Which, for the record, it likely doesn’t. There have been no studies conclusively linking the death penalty to crime deterrence. And between 1990 and 2020, every state WITH the death penalty in the US had a higher homicide rate than every state WITHOUT the death penalty. But if we’re going purely on public sentiment, that means there’s a good chunk of people who believe that it has no deterrent effect yet still think its justified, indicating they believe in the death penalty for some other reason, such as for vengeance, an eye for an eye, a sense of justice.
On top of that, fully 73% of people say there IS risk an innocent person would be put to death. So there is a large portion of people who support the death penalty despite the fact that there is a risk that someone innocent would be put to death. And it’s true, there have been over TWO HUNDRED death row exonerations since the 1970s. Over 200 times when people were sentenced to death who shouldn’t have been either because of innocence or some sort of procedural misconduct.
The more educated a Democrat is, the less likely they are to support the death penalty, with only 36% of Democrats with postgrad degrees supporting the death penalty. Educational attainment has, by comparison, no effect on whether Republicans support the death penalty. And support for the death penalty has increased in recent years from a low around 2016 of 49% of people in support of the death penalty for murder. But the death penalty has almost always been supported by a majority of Americans over the last century. There was a brief moment around 1966 when the graph flipped and 47% of people opposed the death penalty compared to 42% who supported it, likely due to lower crime rates and the civil rights movement. This was followed by a dramatic increase in support of the death penalty, peaking at an all-time high of 80% of people in support of the death penalty in the mid 1990s, likely due to surging crime rates in the 1990s, an increase in “tough on crime” culture, the war on drugs, fear of the young black superpredator, mass incarceration, and the advent of the 24-hour news cycle which fed off of covering sensational crimes.
In short, support of the death penalty in the US is cultural. Stats don’t really play a role in it. People KNOW that innocent people get put on death row. People KNOW that the death penalty doesn’t really have a deterrent effect on violent crime. I can tell you that it is actually significantly MORE expensive to put someone on death row than to put them in prison for life without parole, more expensive by an estimated 1 to 3 MILLION dollars PER inmate because of all the extra trial time and cost of appeals and of the execution itself, especially in Christa Pike’s case because you know that hospital time wasn’t cheap. I can tell you that the death penalty isn’t practiced in most of the rest of the world and the US is in bad company with those who do practice the death penalty. And that the death penalty is technically against international human rights law. And that the reason the US can’t seem to execute people very well is because pharmaceutical companies and European governments won’t allow the sale of drugs to the US to be used in executing people. And that the reason why these executioners appear to be so so bad at finding a vein to administer the drugs, if they can even get them in the first place, is because lethal injection presents a moral and ethical quandary that cannot be overcome–doctors and healthcare professionals are bound to do no harm both by the hippocratic oath but also by the American Medical Association which bars doctors from participating in executions. To be willing to do so means a willingness to set aside the very basic ethical considerations of your practice. And so finding someone actually skilled at placing IV lines, especially in major arteries, who is willing to participate in a state execution is a practical impossibility.
I could tell you all of these facts. But these appeals to reason don’t matter in the face of longstanding cultural norms that has every comment section on the internet teeming with people who are foaming at the mouth for the state to commit homicide in their name. This is what “justice” looks like in the United States of America.
The problem is that this isn’t justice. And it doesn’t feel like justice. I’m sorry to tell you that convictions of all sorts rarely do feel like justice, in my experience. I truly think every person in the US should be forced through their high school civics classes to attend a criminal sentencing hearing to understand where their tax dollars are going. Not the sensationalized courtroom dramas, but instead to read the indictment of the person, the horrific things they did, and then to show up at the courtroom on sentencing day, see the convicted person, listen to the victim statements from all the people he or she hurt, and listen to the defendant’s statement, and to the judge’s sentence in full. It is incredibly dissatisfying and sad. There is no sentence that will undo the damage, that will make anything “right” again, or that will give anyone, least of all the crime victims, a feeling of “satisfaction” and wholeness. Horrific things happen and we have as a society deemed it the state’s job to hold people accountable for the crimes they commit, but we have misplaced our expectations thinking that when the state holds people accountable for committing crimes that that is “justice.” That it will feel good. It almost never does short of fulfilling a sadistic fantasy that ultimately causes more harm, more hurt.
And, to be clear, what Christa Pike did was heinous. Unforgivable. Full stop. Colleen Slemmer should still be alive, there is no excuse for Christa Pike’s horrific actions, what she did was unthinkable. She also attempted murder while in prison and also allegedly attempted an escape plot as well. Her crime, her conviction, and her numerous ENDLESS appeals through the system over the last 30 years have cost the people of Tennessee countless tax dollars. It is also true that Christa Pike was diagnosed with bipolar disorder while behind bars, that she was the victim of horrific child sexual abuse and parental neglect. Christa Pike’s story is nothing if not an allegory of the impossibility of finding actual justice in the US justice system. The system failed her at every level before she ever committed murder and her life sitting on death row waiting to die, a victim herself as well as a cold blooded convicted murderer, is the embodiment of just fucking depressing wasted life. Of the violent, horrific, despicable ways humans can hurt other humans and how that cycle continues itself despite the intervention of the “criminal justice system.” Even if the state of Tennessee had successfully carried out its execution of Christa Pike last week, that wouldn’t change any of it.
And in light of that fact and the very real fact of the current state of authoritarianism in the United States government right now, I think this is a really important moment to sit with the fact that in the United States we have collectively, willingly, for some gleefully, handed over the power to commit murder to the state in our name. Whether or not you think Christa Pike deserves to die I implore you to ask yourself do you think the government deserves the right to murder? Because this becomes a slippery slope. A state with the power to murder is going to uphold that power at every level. The Supreme Court of the United States has upheld the death penalty repeatedly. In some cases, like in the case of Glossip v. Gross from 2015, sometimes gleefully. Sam Alito is an evil fucking wretch and he was all too happy to insist in that case from 2015 that there’s nothing in a lethal injection cocktail that could possibly be cruel or unusual, even if multiple experts reported that the drug being used for sedation in Oklahoma at the time very likely couldn’t properly keep a person sedated long enough to last through the lethal injection, even if it had literally already happened that an inmate had awoken MID LETHAL INJECTION, only to die moments later, gruesomely, from a drug that Judge Sotomayor in her dissent likened to being burned alive from the inside. The Supreme Court has, time and again, said that the constitution empowers the government to murder people and, apparently, that empowerment outweighs the protection against cruel and unusual punishment even as nearly every other society the world over ends the practice because of its brutality. Okay so aside from a few dissenting liberal justices, it surely won’t be the Supreme Court that intervenes because, as Sam Alito says in the Glossip case, well it’s execution, silly, it’s gonna be a little painful. What’s a government intent on murder to do?? NOT do murder? That’s crazy.
And because of that, it’s also not going to be Congress to step in, because not only would a ban on capital punishment violate the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the constitution but also Congress leaves that type of criminal enforcement up to the states. So even if they banned the death penalty on a federal level–again, they couldn’t because according to the Supreme Court any such ban would be unconstitutional–it would still be left to the states to decide how to punish people for their own state criminal statutes.
But just sticking with the federal government, THIS is the federal government we want making execution decisions? The one that has found every single way to abuse its power and exploit the weaknesses in the system where they know they can get away with it or at the very least fuck shit up while the lawsuits roll in? And let me just paint this very starkly: Pete Hegseth has called for the execution of Nidal Hasan, which Trump has approved. Hasan is Palestinian American and the mass shooting he perpetrated has been called the worst terrorist attack on US soil since September 11th, though he was not charged with terrorism. When he was court-martialed in 2013, he stated that in orchestrating the attack he believed he was protecting Muslims and the Taliban in Afghanistan. What Hasan did was a horrific act of violence and I think in the US when a person can be tied to terrorism, especially the Taliban, especially when they are Muslim, there is a special hatred and vengeance seeking that makes people more comfortable with the idea of the death penalty for someone like Nidal Hasan.
But there are some things that give me pause here–the fact that he is Palestinian and the fact that he can be linked with terrorism and the fact that Pete Hegseth chose this moment to move forward with his execution. In a country with a government that has increased its violent extremist rhetoric against leftists to conflate terrorism like what Nidal Hasan did with “domestic terrorism” and with made up groups of leftists they’ve deemed “terrorists”, with pro-Palestinian college students they think are aligned with “terrorists” or when they’ve written off any immigrant with a tattoo as a member of tren de aragua or some other organization they’ve recently labeled a terrorist organization, and then they start gleefully murdering terrorists by firing squad. If we are comfortable with the government, a government led by known and habitual liars, by people literally convicted of federal crimes themselves, making decisions about who to charge with offenses punishable by death, and with them carrying out that death sentence against a person like Nidal Hasan, or Christa Pike, though that was a state execution, to be clear, it creates a permissiveness of state violence that is a slippery slope. ICE has already extra-judicially murdered people in the streets of Minneapolis and some people cheered about it, said they deserved it, because they were protesting. Protesting state violence. And if you’re someone who was horrified by those ICE killings but you feel perfectly comfortable with the state killing someone so long as they’ve gone through our deeply flawed judicial system, a judicial system that Trump has made clear is easily exploitable, easily makes mistakes, easily manipulated the man was convicted of 34 felonies, supported an armed insurrection at the capital, and is now president again if you feel ok with that system determining that the state should have the power to murder someone then I think you need to re-examine your politics. It is a slippery slope. It was before Trump came into power, he’s just made it that much more obvious how easily a person can abuse their power, how flawed the system is, how little faith we should put in it to deliver true “justice.” Just because we’ve sanitized state violence so we’re no longer drawing and quartering people in the streets does not make it any more “civilized” it simply gives the state the veneer of control, of authority, of legitimacy. And the botched execution of Christa Pike has laid bare the barbarity of state executions done under the veneer of medication. And Trump, in all his actions especially during this second term, has laid bare how quickly state violence can turn on you, too, if you step out of line.
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