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The failed lethal injection of convicted Tennessee murderer Christa Pike, and the proposed livestreamed execution by firing squad of US Army major Nidal Hasan, sentenced to death for 13 murders, drew the world’s attention to America’s exceptional use of the death penalty.
In Australia, Queensland’s abolition of the death penalty in 1922, made it the first jurisdiction in the British Empire to do so. Western Australia, the final state to do away with capital punishment, abolished it in 1984.
Britain abolished the death penalty in 1965 and Canada did so in 1976.
By retaining the death penalty and inflicting capital punishment, the United States keeps company with countries such as Iran, North Korea and Somalia. If the military carries out Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s plan to livestream Hasan’s execution, American-style justice will resemble Afghanistan’s, not the majority of the world’s democracies.
A state matter
Most executions in the US are conducted under state authority in the 27 (out of 50) states that currently retain the death penalty. For capital crimes deemed federal offences, including ones prosecuted by courts martial, presidential approval is required for executions to be carried out.
One of President Donald Trump’s first executive orders in his second term reversed President Joe Biden’s moratorium on federal executions.
Since the mid-19th century, US politicians, judges, and religious and secular lobbyists have opposed the death penalty. The abolition movement peaked in the 1960s, when approval of capital punishment dipped to 42%. Today, that rate sits at 52%. Yet, just 23 states have abolished the death penalty.
The death penalty and American exceptionalism
Historically, the concept of American exceptionalism has referred to the republic’s founding in democracy, liberty and rights.
Paradoxically, Americans invoke those values to support the death penalty, not just its abolition.
In the 1950s and ‘60s, civil rights activists used evidence of racial bias in the use of capital punishment to argue it was unconstitutional. In 1972, the US Supreme Court agreed. Since state death penalty statutes failed to prevent their “arbitrary and capricious” administration, they were unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.
That decision overturned every retentionist state’s death penalty laws and it spared close to 600 prisoners on death row. For five years, no executions occurred in the US.
Yet, the Supreme Court did not represent the will of the people. Was its ruling undemocratic?
Thirty-five states thought so, and they updated their death penalty statutes in response. In 1976, the Supreme Court ruled the revised statutes were constitutional on procedural grounds. Besides, the majority argued, “in a democratic society, legislatures, not courts, are constituted to respond to the will and consequently the moral values of the people”.
Executions resumed in the US in 1977, the first one in Utah, conducted by firing squad. Although the American Civil Liberties Union tried to intervene, the condemned man, Gary Gilmore, who twice attempted suicide, asserted his right to choose to die for committing two robbery murders.
After 1977, there were few executions by firing squad but the number of deaths by other means mounted. One reason for the escalation was the introduction of lethal injection in 1982. This method made capital punishment more palatable to Americans. Compared with the gas chamber, the electric chair and death by firing squad, lethal injection, its advocates claimed, made execution clean, clinical and painless.
Yet, that promise turned out to be false. Compared with the methods it replaced, lethal injection is the method most likely to be botched, as Pike’s case has revealed.
Four months before Tennessee failed to execute Pike, corrections officials called off another inmate’s execution after death chamber technicians could not insert the intravenous line for pentobarbital.
In South Carolina, where condemned prisoners can choose death by electrocution, firing squad or lethal injection, a convicted murderer, Brad Sigmon, opted for firing squad in March 2025 because he knew the previous three men the state executed by lethal injection had experienced prolonged suffering.
As legal and political battles brew over Pike’s and Hasan’s cases, bipartisan objections to her re-execution and his public execution have emerged. But the possibility of both outcomes remains.
In Tennessee, state Republicans are leaning in favour of returning to the electric chair, the method US Senator and state gubernatorial candidate, Marsha Blackburn, advocates.
Far from reckoning with the justifiability of capital punishment, the state majority leader pledged to “speed up” the appeals process and use a method “that’s far more reliable and predictable”.
Execution as deterrent?
Politicians typically frame such claims in terms of victims’ rights. The mother of Colleen Slemmer, the 19-year-old Pike confessed to torturing and murdering, watched as the state botched the execution of her daughter’s killer.
Similarly, Hegseth has justified the livestreamed execution of a man who brutally gunned down troops at Fort Hood before he was shot and paralysed. The execution must be public, Hegseth said, “because people need to understand there’s serious consequences for these types of things”.
The belief that the death sentence’s deterrent value is most potent when the public can witness executions is remarkably resilient. Yet, there is no compelling evidence to support its purportedly unique capacity to deter murderous violence.
Americans are not exceptionally brutal. But the prevailing politics of capital punishment in the US certainly are.
Author
Carolyn StrangeProfessor of History, School of History, ANU, Australian National University
Disclosure statement
Carolyn Strange does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
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Australian National University provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.
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DOI
https://doi.org/10.64628/AA.k7w7edpwv
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