America’s use of the death penalty is under scrutiny again after US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that the military would livestream the execution by firing squad of Nidal Hasan. Hasan, a former military psychiatrist, fatally shot 13 unarmed US soldiers at the Fort Hood military base in Texas in 2009.
If carried out, it would be the first time the US Army had used a firing squad since 1945. The method is already authorised by several states. The announcement follows the botched lethal injection of Christa Pike, a woman convicted of murdering her classmate.
Botched executions prompt a search for alternatives
Pike was taken to hospital after her failed execution and later returned to prison 10 days afterwards, her lawyers said. Her lawyers had warned about medical conditions, including thrombocytosis, that they said could complicate the procedure. During the attempt, they said, “she could be heard crying, whimpering, and breathing loudly throughout the procedure.”
Lethal injection has been the most common method in the US since it was first introduced in Texas in 1982, and many states now use it as their default. The Death Penalty Information Center, a non-profit think tank that says it takes no position on the death penalty, counts 64 botched executions over the past 50 years, including 51 botched lethal injections, out of a total of 1,683 executions.
Medical experts and researchers who study executions say every method the US uses can cause severe pain, especially when it goes wrong. Dr Joel Zivot, a professor of anaesthesiology and surgery based in Atlanta, Georgia, said states adopted lethal injection because it appeared from the outside to be more peaceful. He said the drugs can sometimes cause pulmonary edema, when a person’s lungs fill with fluid and produce the painful sensation of drowning.
Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said human error remains a constant risk. “We always have the possibility that there’s going to be a mistake made when human beings are involved in executions,” she said. She pointed to inadequate staff training, degraded or expired drugs, and states experimenting with drug combinations that had never been used before.
Obtaining the drugs is also difficult. Maher and others noted that many pharmaceutical companies do not want their medicines sold to prisons for executions, because the drugs were developed for life-saving purposes. Most of the time, little is public about the people who administer the injections, since states do not usually share their training records.
Nitrogen gas, electric chair and firing squads
Some states have turned to nitrogen gas, a method that is controversial. Alabama and Louisiana are the first states to have carried out executions this way, while Arkansas, Mississippi and Oklahoma also permit it. The method involves forcing a prisoner to breathe pure nitrogen until they suffocate.
Alabama used nitrogen gas to execute Kenneth Eugene Smith two years ago, after a botched lethal injection attempt on him in 2022. A witness said Smith thrashed violently on the gurney as the gas was administered during the 25-minute execution. Dr Zivot said people who inhale the gas sometimes have seizures, and that Alabama has executed seven people this way since introducing the method in January 2024. “Each time it was a horror show of struggling, of moving, of seizing,” he said.
Other states have revived some of the earliest methods. As of this year, nine states have approved the electric chair, and South Carolina uses it as its default. Maher said electrocution “has a horrible history of botched executions”, and that errors with it were among the reasons states moved to lethal injection.
In 1997, Pedro Medina’s head caught fire during his execution in an electric chair in Florida. His attorney, Mike Minerva, described the scene in comments quoted in press coverage: “A solid flame covered his whole head, from one side to the other. I had the impression of somebody being burned alive.”
Firing squads, once used as military punishment and in wartime, have also proven vulnerable to human error. Mikahl Mahdi was executed by a three-person firing squad in 2025 after admitting to killing an off-duty police officer in 2004. His lawyers say his death was prolonged because the bullets missed his heart and struck his liver and other organs.
Federal policy and renewed support for executions
Idaho became the first state to use a firing squad as its primary execution method in July, after it encountered problems with lethal injections. Mississippi, Oklahoma, Utah and South Carolina also authorise firing squads. Alonzo Lunsford, a former US Army sergeant who survived being shot seven times by Hasan during the Fort Hood attack, told reporters that the firing squad was a “befitting” way to end Hasan’s life, while lethal injection or a gas chamber would be “doing him a favour”.
Hanging was the main US execution method until the 1890s and remains in use in some Asian countries, but no US state authorises it. Maher said this is because of its “terrible” history, and she linked it to racial violence and lynching. “So that is why there’s no state that’s using hanging or has authorised that method to be used,” she said.
President Trump, who supports the death penalty, restored federal executions when he returned to office in 2025, after the Biden administration had imposed a moratorium on them in 2021. His office wrote in an executive order that “capital punishment is an essential tool for deterring and punishing those who would commit the most heinous crimes and acts of lethal violence against American citizens.” Maher said there has been “quite a bit of activity” in state legislatures to approve other execution methods since Trump expressed enthusiasm for the death penalty.
Trump has called for the death penalty to be expanded to cover large-scale drug dealers, human traffickers and those who kill police officers. Asked by reporters whether Pike’s failed injection should prompt changes, he did not directly answer, saying the execution method “shouldn’t be very difficult”.
