In Three States, Faint Signs of a Reckoning for Lethal Injection

Lethal injection has been America’s most popular method of putting people to death since before it was even used. Designed in the feverish post-Furman rush to resume executions, it would be most actively executing states’ method by the end of the century despite a history of botched executions dating from its first use. However, three states—one with an active death chamber, the other two seeking to resume executions—recently provided very different signals that the method’s problems may be too large to overcome.

A Brief History of Lethal Injection’s Logistical Issues

From the beginning, experts have anticipated issues finding the personnel and drugs required to effect the “quiet death“ lethal injection aspired to be. While personnel issues can be worked around with lowered standards (often to disastrous effect), the bigger problem has been the logistics of execution drugs themselves. From 1977 to 2010, it was every lethal injection protocol used the same three-drug “cocktail:“ the sedative sodium thiopental, a paralytic (which stops the subject from moving or breathing), and potassium chloride (which, in excess, interferes with the electrolyte exchange the heart needs to contract). In 2010, however, sodium thiopental’s main manufacturer exited the US market (for all uses) to avoid complicity with the death penalty, leaving prison systems scrambling for an alternative drug (again, often to disastrous effect).

Montana Admits It Can’t Carry Out Lethal Injection

Last week, the Montana legislature defeated a bill that would have changed the language in the state’s lethal injection authorization. State law currently requires that the state use “a lethal quantity of an ultra-fast-acting barbiturate in combination with a chemical paralytic agent” to effect Montana executions, the language it has used since adopting lethal injection in 1995. A state judge recently ruled that the common thiopental substitute pentobarbital didn’t meet the definition of “ultra-fast-acting“ (referring to its onset of action, which is slightly slower than thiopental). Rather than struggle with a sedative that would have met the definition, House Bill 205 would have replaced this language with “a substance or substances in a lethal quantity sufficient to cause death,” a change that state officials openly admitted was about allowing the Department of Corrections more latitude in how executions were carried out (similar to, but less broad than, a successful 2022 bill in Mississippi). The bill’s failure amounts to an indefinite moratorium on executions in Montana.

Louisiana and Idaho Look Forward—and Back—for Workarounds to Execution Issues

Elsewhere, state prison officials are looking to abandon or at least make less use of lethal injection.

Idaho, chastened by its failure to kill Thomas Creech last year, is moving to make the firing squad its main method of execution. While the legislature debated the method’s comparative humaneness, Idaho Deputy Attorney General LaMont Anderson openly admitted in committee testimony that frustration with lethal injection triggered the change:

(Anderson is somewhat confused about his own department’s protocol here: while Idaho does require a “licensed physician“ to insert a central line—a requirement that doesn’t guarantee a humane execution—its requirement for peripheral IVs is far more forgiving.)

Louisiana, meanwhile, has designed its first protocol for execution by nitrogen asphyxiation. The state—which has not carried out an “involuntary“ execution since 2002—issued a three-paragraph description of the protocol through the governor’s office; the Death Penalty Information Center notes that the summary is suspiciously non-specific. Nitrogen-based executions have so far been carried out only by Alabama; the results have been hotly contested, with eyewitness accounts of subjects in apparent extremes of suffering met with unconvincing denials from the state’s attorney general and corrections commissioner.

Three States Isn’t Necessarily a Pattern

One heady week of news does not a trend make, and there are quite a few counterexamples within the last month. Tennessee recently took up the same drug Montana dropped; Arizona ignored its own review in order to restart executions; and the Trump administration has declared a federal policy of assisting states in carrying out executions. Lethal injection will remain alive and well for many years to come, even in Louisiana and Idaho (which aren’t officially dropping the method, just deprioritizing it). However, these could be signs that the widespread, simple, and wrong answers popular with the American death penalty may be giving way to something more complex—for better and worse.