ANALYSIS

The condemned woman who did not die. Who still uses the death penalty, and which limits of the law they breach

2 October 2026 — United States / World

On Wednesday evening, in a Nashville prison, a 50-year-old woman received two doses of the drug that was supposed to kill her and remained conscious. According to a journalist present as a witness, at one point she looked towards the officials and asked whether it was supposed to feel like this. After almost an hour the procedure was halted, the witnesses were led out and Christa Pike was taken to hospital. There, now, doctors are working to save her life. It is the same life the state had just tried to take, and that the law allows it to try to take again.

This piece starts with her, but it does not stop at the United States. In 2025 the countries that carried out death sentences numbered 17. Recorded executions totalled 2,707, the highest figure in more than forty years. And almost all of them took place far from the spotlight that is now shining on Tennessee.

The facts

Christa Pike was sentenced to death in 1996 for the murder of Colleen Slemmer, 19, killed in 1995 in woods near a vocational training centre in Knoxville. Pike was 18. She spent thirty years on death row. She would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in about two centuries.

The execution was set for 30 September 2026 at the Riverbend maximum-security prison in Nashville. At around 8 p.m. she was given two doses of pentobarbital. Pike remained conscious: witnesses heard her heartbeat and then loud snoring. At around 8:53 p.m. the procedure was stopped. Pike was taken to a nearby hospital, where she is receiving life-saving care. Her lawyers describe her condition as critical.

The Department of Correction says it followed every step of the protocol required by law. Governor Bill Lee cancelled the executions still scheduled for 2026 and ordered a review by an outside party. It is not Tennessee's first failure this year: in May the execution of Tony Carruthers was called off after more than an hour of failed attempts to insert an IV line. According to his lawyers, the person in charge had not done so on a patient for over ten years.

What happens now has not been decided. Pike could be returned to death row. Her lawyers are asking for the sentence to be commuted to life imprisonment and call what she endured chemical torture. There are precedents. In May 1946 Willie Francis, a Black teenager from Louisiana convicted of a murder committed at 15, survived the electric chair at 17. The federal Supreme Court rejected his appeal (Louisiana ex rel. Francis v. Resweber) and in May 1947 he was executed at the second attempt. In 2009 Ohio failed to insert an IV line into Romell Broom, and in 2016 the state Supreme Court ruled that it could try again. Broom died of Covid on death row in 2020, before a second attempt. Pike's case, however, is different: this time the drug entered her body.

Who still kills by law

The most complete picture is Amnesty International's annual report on death sentences and executions in 2025, published in May 2026. The figures are minimums: they include only the executions the organisation was able to document.

Source: Amnesty International, Death Sentences and Executions 2025 (May 2026). The total of 2,707 excludes China.

Two countries account for almost everything. Iran and Saudi Arabia alone account for 93% of recorded executions. In Iran the rise was sharp after the twelve-day war with Israel in June 2025: 654 executions in the first half of the year, 1,505 in the second. Tehran passed a law punishing "espionage" and "collaboration with hostile states" with a mandatory death sentence, in force since 15 October 2025. Since 13 June 2025 at least 11 men have been executed after trials for spying for Israel that Amnesty describes as grossly unfair. This site has already documented the use of the death penalty as a tool of repression in Iran, in the pieces on the repression of the protests and on dissent redefined as terrorism.

Drugs are the leading cause. 1,257 executions, 46% of the total, were for drug offences, in China, Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Singapore. In 2024 there had been 637.

The United States is the only country in the Americas that executes, and has been for seventeen consecutive years. In 2025 there were 47 executions in 11 states, almost double the 2024 figure, and almost half of them in Florida. Alabama and Louisiana used nitrogen asphyxiation; South Carolina executed three men by firing squad. At the end of the year there were 1,948 people on American death row, 47 of them women: for the first time fewer than two thousand.

How people are killed by law. The report lists the methods used in 2025:

Nitrogen asphyxiation is the newest method, introduced in Alabama in 2024 as an alternative to an increasingly contested lethal injection. The person breathes pure nitrogen through a mask until they die from lack of oxygen. According to witnesses, the first man executed this way, Kenneth Smith, in January 2024, took more than twenty minutes to die, convulsing. In November 2024 a group of UN experts asked the United States to ban the method, because it may amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, or even torture.

Other figures from the report. Worldwide, at the end of 2025, at least 25,508 people were awaiting execution. Women executed numbered 61 in Iran, 5 in Saudi Arabia, one in Egypt and one in Kuwait, plus an unknown number in China. There were at least 17 public executions: 11 in Iran and 6 in Afghanistan. Japan, Taiwan, South Sudan and the United Arab Emirates resumed executions after a pause.

China and the hole in the numbers. Amnesty stopped publishing estimates for China in 2009, because the authorities in Beijing were using those figures, always lower than reality, as if they were complete. Beijing has never published a figure. For Amnesty it remains the world's leading executioner, with thousands every year. In Viet Nam, too, the data are a state secret. For these countries there is no honest number to write, and that in itself is a fact: the UN moratorium resolutions call on all states to publish information on their use of the death penalty.

Israel, a new case. Israel has executed two people since its founding; the last was Adolf Eichmann, in 1962. On 30 March 2026 the Knesset passed, by 62 votes to 48, the Death Penalty for Terrorists Law. The text runs on two tracks. In the military courts of the West Bank, where Palestinians are tried, death by hanging is the standard sentence for killings classified as terrorism, to be carried out within 90 days of the final judgment and with no possibility of commutation. In the civilian courts the law applies only to those who kill with the aim of denying the existence of the State of Israel: a formula that in practice excludes Jewish perpetrators of attacks.

The day before the vote the foreign ministers of Italy, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand had urged the Knesset to drop it, pointing to the law's de facto discriminatory character. On 31 March the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, wrote that applying it to residents of the occupied territories would constitute a war crime. The United States did not condemn it, citing Israel's sovereignty.

Several Israeli organisations, including the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) and Adalah, have petitioned the Supreme Court. The judge assigned to the case did not suspend the law as an interim measure and asked the government to respond by 24 May. On 17 May the army's Central Command chief signed the order making it applicable in the West Bank. On 11 May the Knesset had also approved, by 93 votes to none, a special military tribunal that will be able to sentence to death Palestinians accused of taking part in the attacks of 7 October 2023. As of the date of this article we have found no report of a Supreme Court ruling or of death sentences handed down under the new laws.

Not only negative signals. In 2025 no death sentence was handed down or carried out in Belarus, for the first time since Lukashenko came to power (1994). Viet Nam abolished the death penalty for eight offences, including drug transportation and corruption. Zimbabwe commuted all death sentences. In Alabama, Governor Kay Ivey granted clemency to Rocky Myers: the first granted to a Black prisoner since 1976. At the end of 2025, 113 countries were abolitionist for all crimes, compared with 16 in 1977. A further 9 have abolished it for ordinary crimes and 23 have not used it for years. 54 countries retain it.

Legal analysis: where the law says no

It needs saying straight away, because it is the point most often got wrong: general international law does not prohibit the death penalty. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, in Article 6, protects the right to life and at the same time allows capital punishment in countries that have not abolished it, under precise conditions. The absolute ban applies only to states that have ratified the Second Optional Protocol to the Covenant (1989) and, in Europe, Protocols 6 and 13 to the European Convention on Human Rights.

What the law imposes on everyone are limits. The UN Human Rights Committee summarised them in General Comment No. 36 of 2019:

• Only for the "most serious crimes", meaning intentional killing (para. 35). Drug offences are not among them, so almost half of the executions of 2025 breach this limit. The Covenant binds only the states that have ratified it, and Saudi Arabia, China and Singapore have not. The same limit nevertheless applies to them as a UN standard, set by the Safeguards guaranteeing protection of the rights of those facing the death penalty adopted by the Economic and Social Council in 1984: a standard, not a treaty.
• Never for those who were minors at the time of the offence (Art. 6(5) of the Covenant; Art. 37 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, ratified by every state in the world except the United States). In 2025 Iran and Saudi Arabia breached it at least three times.
• Never a mandatory death penalty. A law that takes the choice away from the judge makes the sentence arbitrary (para. 37). Amnesty documented mandatory death sentences in Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Trinidad and Tobago and Yemen. Israel's 2026 law makes it the standard sentence in military courts, with narrow exceptions.
• Never after an unfair trial or a forced confession. Amnesty documented trials of this kind in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, China, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Singapore and Yemen.
• Never on people with serious mental or intellectual disabilities (para. 49). People in this condition were on death row in Japan and the United States, among others.
• Never in a discriminatory way (Arts. 2 and 26 of the Covenant; Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination).
• In occupied territory further rules apply. The Fourth Geneva Convention (Art. 75) prohibits carrying out a death sentence before six months have passed since the Protecting Power was notified of the final judgment, and always guarantees the right to seek pardon. The 90-day deadline and the ban on commutation in the Israeli law are why Türk speaks of a war crime.
• Never with methods that inflict avoidable suffering. The prohibition of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment (Art. 7 of the Covenant; Convention against Torture) also applies to the way a sentence is carried out (para. 40).

The American case has a particular feature. The United States ratified the Covenant in 1992 with two reservations on exactly these points. With the first it reserves the right to impose the death penalty on anyone except pregnant women, including for crimes committed by minors. With the second it accepts the Article 7 prohibition of cruel treatment only to the extent that it coincides with what its Constitution prohibits (text of the reservations). In practice, whether a failed execution is cruel treatment is decided by the US Supreme Court, not by the UN Committee. On minors, the Supreme Court later reached on its own the point the Covenant wanted to take it to: since 2005 (Roper v. Simmons) the United States no longer executes people who were under 18 at the time of the crime.

Two elements bear directly on the Pike case. The first is the wait. In 1989 the European Court of Human Rights, in Soering v. United Kingdom, barred the United Kingdom from extraditing a man to the United States because years of waiting on death row already amounted to inhuman treatment. Pike spent thirty. The second is mental health: after her conviction, experts and Tennessee's own Department of Correction diagnosed her with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Two facts of American law remain. The Constitution obliges the state to provide medical care to prisoners: deliberate indifference to their serious medical needs is cruel punishment (Estelle v. Gamble, 1976). And the same Constitution, as the Francis and Broom cases show, does not prohibit retrying a failed execution. The state is therefore bound to save Christa Pike, and is not prevented from killing her after saving her.

Who calls for it, and what the data say

Even in Italy, where the Constitution prohibits it (Art. 27, with no exceptions since 2007), part of the public would like the death penalty for certain crimes. According to an SWG poll of February 2024, 31% of Italians would favour reintroducing it, 57% are against and 12% gave no answer. According to the reported data, the crimes most often cited are murder (28%), child sexual abuse (25%) and rape (23%), and 5% would want it even for theft. The available sources do not make clear whether these percentages are calculated on all respondents or only on those in favour.

In other democracies more people are in favour. The polls ask different questions and should be compared with caution, but the order of magnitude is clear:

Two things stand out. First: public opinion does not decide practice. Japan, with 83% in favour, executed one person in 2025; France and the United Kingdom, with half the population in favour, remain abolitionist. In Europe abolition was a choice made by parliaments, often against the majority of voters. Second: for the countries that execute the most, Iran, Saudi Arabia and China, there are no free and reliable polls. Where the most people are killed, nobody can ask the public whether they agree.

The most common reasons given by those who call for it are two: the death penalty would act as a deterrent, and those who commit certain crimes do not deserve to live in a civilised community. Here we set them against the available data.

Rape and child abuse. Several countries already punish rape with death: in 2025 sentences of this kind were handed down in Bangladesh, India, Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. In Peru a government commission recommended introducing it for the rape of children. In the United States the Supreme Court prohibited it in 2008 for crimes that do not cause the victim's death (Kennedy v. Louisiana). Since 2023, however, Florida, Tennessee, Idaho, Oklahoma and Arkansas have passed laws for child rape, with the declared aim of bringing the question back before the Court. For the UN Committee, which interprets the Covenant, rape, however grave, does not fall among the "most serious crimes" of Article 6, which it reserves for intentional killing.

Scholars and practitioners also point to a risk. If rape is punished like murder, the perpetrator has nothing more to lose by killing the victim, who is often the only witness. In the Kennedy case the American association of social workers also warned of a second effect: much child abuse happens within families, and the prospect of sending a relative to death discourages reporting. A study from the University of California, Riverside (Bansal and Troiano, December 2025) found that in the United States much harsher penalties for child abuse coincided with a rise in child homicides, consistent with the elimination of witnesses. It is a paper not yet peer-reviewed and should be read as an indication, not as proof.

Deterrence. In 2012 the National Research Council, the scientific body of the US national academies, reviewed thirty years of studies and concluded that research does not make it possible to establish whether the death penalty reduces homicides. It recommended that those studies not be used to decide criminal policy. That is not proof that the death penalty does not work. It is proof that nobody has shown that it does.

Error. Since 1973 at least 203 people sentenced to death in the United States have later been found innocent: one for every eight executed. And the United States has one of the judicial systems most open to scrutiny among those that execute. Of errors in Iranian, Chinese or Saudi trials we know nothing.

The symmetry test

The same yardstick, applied to everyone. For each limit, who breached it in 2025 according to the documented data. For states that have not ratified the Covenant these are UN standards, not treaty obligations:

No geopolitical bloc comes out clean. The breaches involve Washington's allies (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait, the Emirates, Singapore, Israel), its adversaries (Iran, China, North Korea) and the United States itself. In 2025 Europe was the only continent with no executions and no new death sentences recorded, after the year-long pause in Belarus, which however keeps the death penalty in law. It should be remembered, though, that European abolition is recent: in France the last execution took place in 1977.

The test also applies to the way the news reaches us. The Pike case made it onto Italian radio because it happened in the United States, which publishes everything: the date of the execution, the protocol, witnesses, times. The 2,159 Iranian executions of 2025 and the thousands in China have neither names nor witnesses. American transparency is precisely what makes the American failure visible. It would be an error of perspective, which this site does not want to make, to conclude that the problem lies mainly there: the United States accounts for 2% of recorded executions.

At the UN, the next occasion to measure positions comes at the end of the year. On 17 December 2024 the General Assembly adopted the tenth resolution for a universal moratorium on executions, with 130 votes in favour, a record; Italy led the negotiations together with Argentina. In 2024, 32 states voted against and 22 abstained. In 2022 the United States had voted against, together with Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, China, North Korea and Viet Nam. The resolution is tabled every two years: the eleventh is expected by the end of 2026.

Editorial judgment

This section expresses the site's position. It is separate from the facts set out above.

There is a question the Pike case makes impossible to avoid: what are they treating her for? Today nobody in Tennessee has said she will be executed again, and the governor has halted everything. But the law allows it, and the precedents exist. If it happened, the state would have used its doctors to make fit for killing a person who was already dying at its hands. It is a short circuit, but it is not an accident. It is the point at which the death penalty shows what it has always been: the state treating a life as a file to be closed, and reopening the file when it jams.

The promise of lethal injection was a clean, medical death without suffering: the "humane" version of capital punishment. Tennessee has failed twice in five months. Alabama and Louisiana have moved to nitrogen. South Carolina has gone back to the firing squad. The harder one looks for the method that causes no suffering, the clearer it becomes that it does not exist.

There is also an older short circuit, and it was born in Italy. In 1764 Cesare Beccaria wrote, in On Crimes and Punishments, that it seemed to him absurd that the laws, which are the expression of the public will, which detest and punish homicide, should themselves commit one, and, to keep citizens from murder, should order a public murder. Twenty-two years later, on 30 November 1786, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany under Peter Leopold was the first state in the world to abolish the death penalty. A site born a few kilometres from Florence cannot fail to recall it.

Those in favour reply that prison too takes away liberty and a fine takes away money: if the state could do nothing of what it punishes, it could punish nothing. The objection is serious, but it fails for a precise reason: death is the only punishment that cannot be corrected. An innocent person in prison can be released and compensated. An innocent person who has been executed cannot. And the 203 innocent people who walked out of American death rows alive show that error is not a textbook hypothesis.

There remains the voice of those who say that for certain crimes, rape, child abuse, savage murder, death is the only just answer, because those who commit them do not deserve to live among us. It is a human reaction and should not be mocked: it comes from horror at what the victims suffered. But the demand for exclusion already has an answer: life imprisonment removes from the community those who are a danger to it, without asking the state to kill. The death penalty does not protect victims, because nobody has shown that it deters. It risks instead exposing new ones, when the rapist realises that killing the person who can accuse him costs him nothing more. And it does not make the community more civilised: it accustoms it to the idea that someone's life can be taken by decree. On this point Beccaria had already said everything.

The American case, however, must not become the tree that hides the forest. In 2026 a country that had executed nobody for sixty years wrote a law that, by its very form, with two tracks and mandatory death for only one of the two peoples, breaches several of the limits listed above at once. Those who are outraged at Tennessee and silent on Tehran, Riyadh, Beijing or Jerusalem are applying the law according to who breaks it. The reverse holds too.

International law has not yet banned the death penalty. But it has set boundaries for it, and almost all the states that use it cross them. That is the part that can be documented, and we have documented it. The rest is a conviction, and here we declare it: a state that can cure you in order to kill you has lost the right to call all this justice.

Update, 9 October 2026. Between 5 and 8 October the Pentagon announced that Nidal Malik Hasan, the former Army major sentenced to death by a court-martial in 2013 for killing 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009, will be executed by a firing squad of soldiers on 3 December at the same base, and that the execution will be livestreamed. According to the Pentagon spokesperson, Trump approved the execution. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said people must be able to watch it, "because people need to understand that there's serious consequences" (PBS, Al Jazeera). Hasan can still turn to a civilian court and, according to military law experts, such a challenge could delay the execution by years. The last US military execution took place in 1961; the last public execution in the United States in 1936. In 2025, according to Amnesty, the recorded public executions in the world took place in only two countries: Iran and Afghanistan. The UN Human Rights Committee, in General Comment No. 36 cited above (para. 40), considers public executions contrary to the prohibition of cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment.

Christa Pike is still in hospital. On 6 October her lawyers said she is conscious and speaking. In a court filing they argue that the IV lines had been placed wrongly and that no one on the execution team noticed. Tennessee has not said whether it will try again. The head of the Department of Correction is stepping down (Al Jazeera). Correction: the first version of this piece dated the execution attempt 1 October. It took place on the evening of 30 September, Nashville time.

What to watch

• Christa Pike's condition and Tennessee's decision: a new attempt or commutation. The outcome of the independent review ordered by the governor.
• The petitions to Israel's Supreme Court against the law of 30 March 2026.
• The vote on the eleventh UN moratorium resolution, at the end of 2026.
• Amnesty's next report, expected in spring 2027.
• The execution of Nidal Malik Hasan, set for 3 December, and any challenge in a civilian court.

Related pieces: Iran: government admits "thousands" dead in protests, then executes the survivors · Who Said What: Dissent Redefined as Terrorism

Sources: Amnesty International — Death Sentences and Executions 2025 (5/2026) · Amnesty International — Condanne a morte ed esecuzioni 2025 (IT, 5/2026) · CBS News (1/10/2026) · Al Jazeera (1/10/2026) · PBS NewsHour (10/2026) · CNN via ABC17 (2/10/2026) · UPI (2/10/2026) · OHCHR — UN experts on nitrogen gas executions (20/11/2024) · Haaretz (30/3/2026) · Joint statement Australia, France, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, UK (3/2026) · UN — High Commissioner Türk on Israel's death penalty law (31/3/2026) · Jerusalem Post — High Court petitions (31/3/2026) · Times of Israel (17/5/2026) · DPIC — Israel's death penalty law (2026) · UN Human Rights Committee — General Comment No. 36 (2019) · ECOSOC — Safeguards, res. 1984/50 · US reservations to the ICCPR (1992) · Fanpage — SWG poll (23/2/2024) · Nippon.com — Cabinet Office poll (2025) · DPIC — Public opinion 2025 (Gallup) · Ipsos / CEVIPOF — Fractures françaises (11/2024) · YouGov (11/2025) · Alabama Reflector (1/8/2025) · Bansal & Troiano, UC Riverside — working paper (12/2025) · National Research Council — Deterrence and the Death Penalty (2012) · DPIC — NRC on deterrence (2012) · DPIC — Innocence · Permanent Mission of Italy to the UN (17/12/2024) · Amnesty International — UN moratorium vote (17/12/2024) · DPIC — UN vote 2022 · Cesare Beccaria, Dei delitti e delle pene (1764)

Verification note: execution figures are Amnesty International's and are minimums. Beccaria is paraphrased from On Crimes and Punishments (1764), ch. XXVIII. Status of the Pike case and of the Israeli law as of 2 October 2026.

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