America’s death penalty problem

In 1995, 18-year-old Christa Pike, along with her boyfriend and a friend, tortured and killed a classmate. Pike was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for her part in the crimes. Last month, officials in Tennessee, where their murder took place, tried to execute her. Around 7.30 at night, officials gave Pike Pinto Barbotol at a dose high enough that it should cause someone to stop breathing and die. But she didn't. She's breathing, moaning, snoring. So the state gave her another dose, but that didn't work either. Around 9pm, the ambulance has arrived. Six days later, Pike woke up and started talking. "I think she is angry and confused about everything right now." The case is shining a spotlight on America's problems with administering the death penalty. Support for the policy has been declining for decades, but the number of executions is going up. Today, on Today Explained from Box, Inside America's Death Penalty Assembly Line. I'm Aina Garten, and each week on Happy Hour, I invite new and old friends for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. On this week's episode, I'm joined by Nathan Lane. We talk about his critically claimed run in death of a salesman, taking his dog to therapy and winning an Emmy for only murders in the building. New episodes of Happy Hour are available every Wednesday. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Cheers! Hey guys, Cassidy Hubbard here. This week on Ann Mom, beloved reporter and beauty queen, Allie LaFourse, opens up about IVF and an incurable genetic disorder, the stress and shame of miscarriage, and the one thing that would have helped her with her transition into motherhood. Check out the latest episode of Ann Mom wherever you get your podcasts. This is Today Explained. Pamela Kovloff is a writer for the New York Times magazine and pro-publica. She's been covering criminal justice for decades, and she has a new book out called Catch the Devil. We began our conversation about the death penalty by talking about its declining popularity. In 1994, 80 percent of Americans told Gallup they supported putting murderers to death. In 2024, that number was just 53 percent. And while executions have started rising again in the last couple of years, there are still way fewer of them taking place now than there were in the 1990s. How much of the decline in the use of the death penalty has to do with in your estimation? People feeling like there's no way to do it, that's humane, that's constitutional. We're taping shortly after news came out that a woman in Tennessee who was on the death row, authorities attempted to put her to death. They gave her two doses of lethal injection medication, and she survived, and then the governor there suspended the use of the death penalty indefinitely. I mean, you read about something like that and you think, like, God, like, is there a way to do this? Right. And this is the second botched execution in Tennessee this year just to give you a sense of things. So, this is more common there than in other states. They've changed their drug protocols and what we don't know a lot about what went wrong with Christopher Pike. She's still alive as far as we know. As of this recording. Right. Whereas in May, it was an issue with accessing veins, which can be an issue with lethal injection. I think it's also important for people to remember, you know, we had the electric chair as the method of execution through the '80s into the '90s in some places. And so, while this is considered a far more humane, quote-unquote way to do this, we can see that nothing is perfect. I will say while the issues of botched executions, I think are very important and I think there's some other ones coming up to be concerned about, which I can speak about, I am more interested in how it is that other errors are made that other people end up with the ultimate punishment when that perhaps was not the right punishment for what occurred. Yeah. And I want to get to, you know, how that process plays out. But as we're, while we stay on the topic of sort of how the death penalty has been used nationwide over the last couple of decades, the big picture, maybe some of its decline is due to difficulties in finding a way to do this in a way that people agree is humane. You've also written that it's just expensive, right? And on top of that, you know, DNA evidence has made it clear that many of the people who were being convicted were not guilty or there wasn't strong enough evidence to convict them. Like, how do you think about that mix of factors? Yeah. Well, I was really struck. So, Florida, which I've spent a lot of time writing about, Florida is the leading place in America by a mile in terms of the number of executions and has a very large death row. Florida's also the leader in wrongful death row convictions. So just to give you a sense of things, Florida holds the distinction of 30 death row exoneration. So what that means is in the modern era, we have had in the past roughly 50 years, there have been 30 men who were given dates of execution who now walk free. And for anyone who pays any attention to how the criminal justice system works and how incredibly difficult it is to overturn a wrongful conviction. If we have 30 people in Florida who have that distinction, we know that there are many more. Yeah, let's talk about Florida. As you know, Texas used to be the leader in putting people to death. Florida has taken that place. What's going on in Florida? When did you realize that something was different there? So it really ramped up last year. So last year, Florida executed 40% of the people who are executed in the US in last calendar year. In this year, there have been 16 men who have been executed in Florida so far just to give you a comparison. Texas is the next state with the highest number of executions and they've executed six men in that time. So we already have outlier states, primarily southern states. And then we have Florida being the ultimate outlier. And there's so many things that make the administration of the death penalty interesting and unique in Florida. The thing that fascinated me the most is among active death penalty states right now. Florida is unique in that one person determines who it is from the hundreds of men on death row who will receive an execution date and what that execution date is. Who is it? And it's Rhonda Santas, the governor of Rhonda Santas. And so I went back and looked at what were the patterns here? What were the things guiding Governor DeSantis's thinking in setting these dates and was fascinated to see and very troubled to see? There are a number of men who've been there so long. They've been there since the 1970s. These are men who were convicted when Gerald Ford was president just to make this real to people. But the dates are not being sat among the men who are what are called death eligible, meaning that they've gone through all their appeals. They aren't being done chronologically. There's no rhyme or reason to the process. And so there's this speculation game among victim's families, prisoners, their advocates about who will be next and men can sit there on death row for decades with that hanging over them. And that is a Florida phenomenon. Yeah, I found that really striking and surprising reading your work and learning that people are commit crimes, decades and decades ago are sentenced decades ago and are facing their fate, facing execution by the state for so long, like this sort of purgatory, drags on and on. You wrote about the Florida death row turning from something like a purgatory where people stay for a long time and something closer to an assembly line, right? Like I think you used a factory metaphor. Yes. Why did you do that? So I was so struck by the fact that in Florida in order to have this pace of executions, there were people who were receiving their dates as little as 30 days, sometimes less, sometimes fewer out from their execution dates. And just to give people a sense of why that is unusual, there are so many things that kick into gear when a death warrant is written. There are numerous legal maneuvers and net steps that happen in the courts. Just to give you a quick example, there was one defendant in Florida this spring who five days before he was scheduled to be executed was finally granted the ability to test DNA evidence in his case that had gone untested. Jeez. He had great lawyers who, you know, didn't sleep to make that happen, but that it came as close as five days to his execution date. I think should give us all pause about, you know, how fast this is moving. So you have multiple people sort of in the queue at the same time. There's a place at Florida's, well, it's in a different unit than Florida's death row that you're taken to once you get your date called death watch. Tell me about death watch. Like what does it look like? Yeah, so death watch is roughly 30 feet from the execution chamber. There are three cells that are there when you receive your date, you are taken from death row to death watch where you're put, I don't want to say solitary because if there are other men who are held there, there are one or two other men, but you're in a far different situation than you would be on death row where there are people walking, you know, guards and other people, you know. So from that point forward, there are roughly 30 days where you are held again within steps of where this will take place. And to me, it was chilling when I was doing my reporting in the spring on this story that I published this summer that all three cells were filled. And as soon as one person was executed, the pattern was that often the next day a new death warrant would be signed and there would be a new person in place. Really dark in this sort of like assembly line leading to execution is really striking. Why do they do that? I mean, why do they put these people next to the place where they'll die? I mean, I think that's one of the many questions I had about that, you know, we talk about not wanting to have cruel and unusual punishment about it, you know, our constitution does not uphold that, but it's such a unique kind of mental torture, I think, to be 30 feet from where you'll be put to death. The other thing I was struck by was the waiting aspect. So if you're on death row, again, you always have this hanging over you. So I talked about the way in which, you know, when you're in that kind of sensory deprivation, you become highly attuned to sounds and smells and things like that. And I interviewed someone who's not on death row anymore, whose sentence was commuted, who talked to me about recognizing that jangle of keys and the steps that this group of people who comes to deliver the death warrant takes and knowing that someone is about to be served with the death warrant, but not knowing, is it me? Is it the guy next to me? Is it someone down the hall? And I just want to say, I understand that, you know, there's a counter argument to all of this, which is, these are people who most often committed terrible crimes, their victims did not know when they were going to be killed. I do think, however, as a state that administers this thing, there has to be a rhyme or reason to this. Otherwise, you have total chaos, including for victims' families, who never know. Are they going to wait one month? Are they going to wait 15 years? They don't know. I'm Phoebe Judge, host of the podcast Criminal. Usually I'm telling stories about other people, but this fall I'm headed out on the road with a brand new show, stories about me and the people I love. It's called Don't Worry. I hope you'll come out and see it. We'll be in cities like Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, and lot's more. Get your tickets at ThisIsCriminal.com/Live. What if we told you there was one thing you could eat to reduce your risk of death by about a quarter? Interested? 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And why when I asked him what he'd destroy with all the power in the world, Jeff said likes and comments because if likes and comments existed when he started, he never would have made the next thing. Creator Destroy. It's a business show, a marketing show, and the show that argues they've always been the same thing. And the wisdom is company and the Fox Media podcast network. Let's talk a little bit about this situation in Florida. Florida's unique policy that allows the governor to be the only one making a decision about win men on death row or put to death. Do you know why it has that system? So I would just want to add one thing that goes to your question, but it's slightly different. I think it's really important to note that governor Lee in Tennessee, seeing what happened last night, we're speaking on October 1st, what happened with Christopher Pike's botched execution. And again, this is the second boxed botched execution of the year. He put a pause on executions for this year. He is having a third party come in and look at protocols. And this is someone who's pro death penalty. And I think those things can work together. You can be pro death penalty and want the system to work as well as it possibly can. So what's interesting to me is that governor Lee has put a pause on things while governor DeSantis seems to be going more than full steam ahead. And again, DeSantis is doing that with this backdrop of all these wrongful convictions. And we can see from what I was just talking about with the five day window, you know, this defendant got DNA testing with five days to spare. When you're moving too quickly, mistakes can happen. Mistakes can happen both legally in that with a case like that, or they can happen in the execution chamber, which takes a great toll on everyone including prison staff. Let me ask about governor DeSantis in Florida, which is who is, you know, going his own way. You report on how he has initiated and enthusiastically pushed for this dramatic acceleration in death row inmates being put to death. You're reporting kind of suggests or ask the question of whether this might be in part to boost his political standing, like he's not going to be the governor for much longer. The election to replace him is in November, maybe he's looking for a job in the Trump administration. Maybe he'll run for prison. And again, do you think that's true? So I will tell you that I tried so hard to figure that out. And I spoke to so many different people in Tallahassee and elsewhere trying to understand what was in the governor's mind. I can't say that I know, I can say that in the past, the playbook, and I think this has changed, but in the past, the playbook, particularly in Florida, was if you are strong, quote unquote, on the death penalty, if you're executing people with some regularity, that helps your poll numbers. We saw this in the 80s on forward literally when people's poll numbers were dropping, this would be a solution to getting voter support. I do think the calculation of that has changed a bit as Americans' opinions of the death penalty have shifted. So all I can speculate to is I think sort of within MAGA world, obviously being tough on crime, and I want to revisit that term in a moment, but the perception of being tough on crime is something that holds a lot of power. But something important is Trump, when Trump came into office, the second time, the day of his inauguration, he signed an executive order that was basically doubling down on the death penalty. Now, he really only has purview to some degree over the federal death penalty, which had fallen by the wayside, basically, and then under his watch, this tremendous number of people in his first term. We're executed and then he came in in his second term and really encouraged and I can't say directed district attorneys because they don't answer to him, but highly encouraged prosecutors across the country to use the death penalty when as much as possible. And you can see in Florida, the laws have been expanded. So that child sexual assault cases, for example, can now result in a death sentence. Things like non-unanimous juries can can render a death sentence or recommend, I should say, in Florida, they recommend it to a judge. So in Florida now, and this is a recent change, you need just eight jurors to sign off on the death penalty, eight out of 12. So that's so different. We don't see that anywhere else in the country. So I think we can see the ways in which this sort of ties into, you know, you think about things like alligator alcatraz and this very performative aspect to law and order. I think what I've tried to do with my work is show that being tough on crime is not necessarily the things that we see politicians saying are being tough on crime. When you talk to victims, families, people who, you know, on the other end of these death penalty cases, what do you hear from them? A whole range of opinions, and I think every family is different, but it is not uncommon, there have been many studies done in which victims have felt a sense of disappointment, you know, that maybe this thing that they'd been, again, think of the build up to some of these. We're talking so many years that it didn't deliver what was promised. And then you at the same time have what I consider to be a new victim's family, you have parents and siblings and children who've lost a child, who've lost a parent because they've been executed. So there's just so much pain around so much of the way this is administered. Does any particular person you've spoken to come to mind, anything you want to share? You don't have to use their name if you don't want to. I am thinking in particular of one member of a victim's family. This was in a death penalty case in Texas that ended in an exoneration. And I spent a lot of time reporting on that, and that reporting helped to lead in part to that happening. And when I spoke to a member of the victim's family afterward, he, there were so many emotions, but that family had been told a certain set of facts by prosecutors for so many years. And of course, they believed that. Why would they not? And he was explaining, even though all the evidence of this person's innocence is there right before me. It's very hard for, you know, my mind understands, but my heart isn't feeling it yet. This is someone who we spent 18 years in court looking at thinking about and imagining him committing this crime against our family. And so you can see that's a wrongful conviction, but you can see in which the ways that victim's families, again, and this sort of tough-uncrime mindset are often not served, that they have to go through a whole other ordeal, like a trial is in and of itself just shattering, right? And that's kind of just the beginning of what victim's families go through in these cases. So I want to close the conversation by bringing us back to the death penalty. And it's future. You've spent many, many years reporting on the death penalty and ways that that system has broken or has failed. Can you imagine an America where the death penalty exists and is used, but is fair? Can it be, can it be said? It exists and is used and is fair. I cannot knowing everything that I know, because it's a human system. So to be clear, nothing is perfect, of course, right? So we know that if we get on an interstate and the speed limit is 65 or 70, there are going to be casualties. At some point, nothing can be perfect, but we accept those risks. I would say that when we're dealing with something like the death penalty, where it's the state putting someone to death and knowing all the ways in which it can go wrong, it's very hard for me to imagine what it looks like getting that right. That's Pamela Kolaugh. You can read her work at ProPublica and The New York Times magazine. Today's episode is a cut-down version of a longer conversation I had with Pamela for the Vox podcast, The Grey Area. If you would like to hear the full interview, you can search The Grey Area, wherever you get your podcasts. And if you want to watch the interview, you can find us on YouTube. Today's show is produced by Thor Newrider and Beth Morrissey, with help from Amina Alsati, engineered by Shannon Mahoney and David Tatashore. Fact check by Melissa Hirsch. Our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy. [BLANK_AUDIO]