The death penalty in the United States of America occupies a very complex and specific place in the Western criminal system, as it does not merely constitute a uniform penal practice, but rather represents a mirror of the deep geographical, political, and legislative division between the states.
According to data documented by the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), the punishment remains officially and legally incorporated in 27 states, in addition to being applied at the federal level and within the military.
On the other hand, 23 states (in addition to Washington, D.C.) succeeded in completely abolishing the penalty, while major states, led by California and Oregon, adopted a “suspended moratorium” policy through direct decisions from their governors.
The capital of the decision, Washington, does not have the final say on how to end the lives of convicts. Rather, the matter is left to each state to formulate its own protocol.
This discrepancy clearly emerges when considering implementation mechanisms, as lethal injection takes the lead in 27 states as the main method.
However, the acute shortage of toxic drugs and legal prosecutions prompted several states to implement alternatives described as brutal. While 9 states keep the electric chair as a second resort, 9 other states provide gas chambers, while 5 states maintain the option of shooting.
At the forefront of this system is the state of Texas, the “execution capital of America,” which alone has carried out more than 602 executions since 1976, followed by the state of Florida with 141.
In Texas, a prisoner is injected with a heavy dose of pentobarbital into a vein in the arm.
As for Oklahoma (132 operations), her room witnessed bitter experiments with mixing 3 drugs that repeatedly caused horrific internal burns before death.
On the other hand, the state of Alabama this year chose a completely different path through the nitrogen suffocation technique, where the prisoner is forced to breathe pure gas through a tight mask until his brain stops working due to lack of oxygen.
In parallel, states like California are experiencing a major paradox. While they contain the largest “death row” in the country with hundreds of prisoners, their governor has been imposing a moratorium on execution for decades.
Names etched in death row records between genders
Cumulative historical statistics reveal a massive and persistent demographic imbalance between the sexes within Death Row cells and in the historical records of those executed.
Since the judicial green light was given to reactivate the penalty in the modern era in 1977, the sentence has been carried out against more than 1,680 men, while the number of women against whom the sentences have been carried out has not exceeded only 18 women over the course of half a century, which represents a small percentage of approximately only 2 percent of the total cases.
This huge difference, according to legal and social experts, is due to the nature of the criminal crimes committed, as women generally tend not to engage in murder crimes associated with harsh aggravating circumstances such as kidnapping and armed robbery, which are the main crimes that the American judiciary constitutionally allows for the death penalty.
Legal defenses related to psychological backgrounds and history of assault also play a major role in reducing the sentences issued against women from death to life imprisonment during trials.
The names of men whose crimes shook American public opinion were engraved in judicial memory. Along with Timothy McVeigh, the mastermind of the 1995 Oklahoma terrorist bombing who was executed by lethal injection in 2001. We find the famous serial killer Ted Bundy, who was electrocuted with the electric chair on the morning of January 24 in a Florida state prison in 1989.
Bandy officially admitted to killing 30 women and girls in 7 different American states during the 1970s. However, experts and criminal investigators estimate that the real number of his victims is much higher, and may exceed 100 victims, given that many crimes and files remained mysterious and the bodies of their victims were not found.
Also prominent is the name of John Wayne Gacy, known as the “Killer Clown,” who was executed in Illinois in 1994 after being convicted of killing 33 young men. A clogged solution tube made it difficult to inject him with poison for a full 18 minutes.
Nor is the name of Stanley “Tookie” Williams, the founder of the famous “Crips” gang in Los Angeles, lost from the records. In prison, he turned into a children’s literature writer and an anti-violence writer who was nominated for the Nobel Prize. However, the then governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, refused to pardon him, so he was executed by injection in 2005 amid massive popular protests.
Likewise, the counties have witnessed the execution of prominent serial killers such as William Bonin, known as the “Highway Killer,” whose life was chemically ended by the state of California in 1996 after complex prosecutions.
On the other hand, the execution of women remains a very rare event, with only 18 cases since 1976. Topping this brief list are names that have marked the history of justice, such as Lisa Montgomery, who was executed after being convicted of a horrific murder and kidnapping by lethal injection in the early hours of the morning on January 13, 2021, inside the federal penal complex in Terre Haute, Indiana.
This implementation came based on an exceptional decision from the first administration of President Donald Trump, which lifted the freeze on federal executions, making Montgomery (52 years old at the time) the first woman executed by the US federal government in 67 years.
She is joined by Aileen Wuornos, who is considered the most famous American serial killer who was executed by lethal injection in 2002 in Florida, and whose tragic biography was turned into the famous Hollywood movie “Monster”, for which Charlize Theron won an Oscar.
Her troubled personality also inspired many international series and documentaries that focused on the scenes of her harsh childhood and the deterioration of her mental state behind bars.
Carla Faye Tucker was executed by lethal injection on the evening of February 3, 1998, inside the prison in Huntsville, Texas, after spending 14 years on death row following her conviction for a horrific double murder using an ax in 1983.
Despite the widespread international petition campaigns that demanded her pardon after her behavioral change inside prison.
If we go back a little, we will find tumultuous historical cases such as Ethel Rosenberg, who was executed by electric chair on the evening of June 19, 1953, inside the famous “Sing Sing” prison in New York State.
The execution came after she and her husband, Julius Rosenberg, were convicted of spying for the Soviet Union and transmitting the secrets of the American atomic bomb during the height of the Cold War, becoming the first civilians to be executed on charges of espionage in peacetime in the history of the United States.
Barbara Graham is an American prisoner who was executed in a gas chamber in California in 1955 after being convicted of murder, and her case gained widespread fame due to her desperate defense of her innocence until the last minute.
Her tragedy and suffering inside the death chamber inspired the Hollywood film industry through the famous film “I Want to Live!” (I Want to Live!), which focused on questioning the integrity of the sentence issued against her.
The most striking irony is evident in the exceptional cases that faced technical complications during the execution of sentences, as the state of Tennessee witnessed the case of prisoner Christa Gale Pike, who was transferred to a medical facility after an attempt to carry out her death sentence via an intravenous injection was unsuccessful.
Tennessee Earthquake: The Night of Christa Pike's Failed Execution
The execution chambers did not expect to witness one of the most complex legal and humanitarian crises in the modern history of American justice, such as the one sparked by the case of prisoner Christa Gale Pike (50 years old) in the state of Tennessee.
Pike, who has been behind bars for nearly 30 years after being convicted of murder in 1995 when she was only 18 years old at the time, came to the fore as the first woman scheduled for execution in the state in 200 years, as she was the only woman on death row there.
However, the actual implementation faced serious medical and legal obstacles. Although the US Supreme Court allowed the procedures to continue, it was not possible to complete the operation successfully. Due to logistical difficulties faced by the concerned team.
Defense lawyers noted in their submissions that the convict suffered a severe chemical failure and remained in critical condition without her heart stopping, which ultimately led to her being transferred under heavy guard to an outside medical facility, where she was placed on medical support.
The political and legislative repercussions were not long in coming, as the Governor of Tennessee, Bill Lee, quickly announced an immediate suspension of all scheduled executions in the state until the end of the year, directing an independent review of prison protocols, which led to the resignation of the head of the Tennessee Department of Corrections, Frank Strada.
The incident sparked an intense political debate between demands to return to alternative means of implementation, and other parties demanding the abolition of the entire system.
The crisis sparked by the Pike incident was not a unique precedent, but rather came as an extension of a series of technical failures, such as the tragedy of prisoner Tony Carruthers in Tennessee itself during the month of May, when the crew was unable to find suitable veins, which forced the state governor to intervene and grant him a reprieve.
Carruthers is convicted of kidnapping and premeditated murder of three people in the city of Memphis, a heinous crime that dates back to February 1994.
This incident recalls the story of prisoner Rommel Broome in Ohio in 2009, whose execution of his sentence was postponed after he survived more than once due to procedural difficulties in preparing the intravenous injection, only to later die of the “Corona” virus inside the prison in 2020.
Before them, prisoner Kenneth Smith faced the impossibility of carrying out a lethal injection sentence in Alabama, before he was later executed in early 2024 by nitrogen gas in a procedure that was the first of its kind.
However, the most notable transformation was witnessed in the case of prisoner Richard Glossip in Oklahoma, who faced nine specific execution dates over three decades. He was finally freed and released on bail in mid-2026 after the Supreme Court ruled to overturn his conviction due to fraud and cover-up by the public prosecution, pending his retrial at large.
The storm of supplies... and the legal impasse of the means of implementation
The recent crises go beyond individual state borders and highlight a structural dilemma facing entire US states: a severe scarcity of standard chemicals used in executions.
Due to the legal and moral boycott imposed by major pharmaceutical companies and international factories on the sale of their products for use in execution chambers, American prison administrations found themselves in a continuing logistical dilemma. To escape this siege, several states have resorted to using local formulation sources to prepare alternative chemical formulations.
The legal problem is that these compounds often lack standard federal oversight and are sometimes mixed in imprecise doses, causing frequent failures and constitutional challenges based on the Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment.
However, the Federal Supreme Court has set strict standards for prisoners, requiring them to stop the implementation of a certain method by proving the existence of an available and practical alternative that definitively reduces pain. This is a condition that has prompted several states to approve alternative methods, such as shooting with bullets or nitrogen gas, to escape the crisis of drugs and toxic injections that now threatens the future of punishment.
