“Tennessee spent ninety minutes turning an execution chamber into a trembling medical farce — a grotesque national ritual where bureaucracy, vengeance, and incompetence merged into a bloody theater,” Pimm Fox writes in his Substack, “Click” about the botched execution last week of Tony Carruthers. Fox marvels that “there are countries that build bridges. . . that cure diseases. . . that place telescopes into orbit to study galaxies older than language itself. And then there is the United States of America, where highly paid adults gather in fluorescent government chambers to spend ninety minutes trying to stab a condemned man in the neck while arguing about whether the doctor knows how veins work.”
“Recent developments have moved the federal death penalty from being a laggard to being a leader in national death penalty trends,” Ngozi Ndulue writes in her Georgia State University Law Review article, “The Federal Death Penalty as a Sign of the TImes.” Ndulue, an Associate Professor of Law at the University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law, believes that, while “The current legislative and judicial landscape means that federal abolition is not imminent,” the first Trump administration’s execution spree in 2020-2021, when 13 federal death-sentenced individuals were executed in six months, resulted in “increased public skepticism about the death penalty.” And, three years later, President Biden commuted the death sentences of 37 of the 40 men on federal death row and “provided a blueprint for addressing a broken system short of total abolition.” As a result, Ndulue writes, “Both of these actions will shape the future of the death penalty, with expected successful attempts at execution but also bolder uses of executive clemency to address persistent issues with capital punishment.”