Christa Pike survived her lethal injection, making her the first death row inmate to do so.
The botched procedure adds her name to a century-long record of gruesome American execution failures that includes electrocutions, hangings, and repeated lethal injection disasters. Roughly 3% of all U.S. Executions between 1890 and 2010 were botched, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Hanging accounted for the highest number of bungled executions at 85. The 1901 execution of outlaw Tom “Black Jack” Ketchum ended with his head popping clean off when he dropped, after executioners failed to account for how much weight he had gained in jail.
Electrocutions took second place for frequency of failure, with multiple cases of condemned inmates’ heads bursting into flames. In 1990, Florida cop killer Jesse Tafaro’s head ignited when electric chair operators tried and failed to send power through his body. They had mistakenly used a non-conductive synthetic sponge under his head cap, turning him into a human short-circuit.
Another Florida inmate’s head caught fire seven years later. “Pedro Medina… Was pronounced dead at 7:10 a.m., but not before a prison official wearing protective gloves helped douse the flames that shot from the condemned man’s head, and so much smoke filled the death chamber that a window to the outside was opened,” the LA Times wrote in 1997.
Lethal injection was introduced as a modern, more humane alternative, yet it produced 75 botched attempts by 2010. The method has continued to fail in spectacular fashion in the years since.
In 2014, Oklahoma rapist and murderer Clayton Lockett’s blood splattered all over the doctor who tried to jam a lethal injection needle into his groin area. “I don’t think he realized that he hit the artery, and I remember saying you’ve got the artery. We’ve got blood everywhere,” a paramedic said.
The state of Alabama had three botched lethal injections in 2022 alone. All three prisoners were left covered in puncture wounds, bruises, and, in one case, jagged gashes as medical staff tried and failed to insert needles into their veins. One prisoner lay strapped to the bed for 90 minutes as paramedics repeatedly stuck him, the Death Penalty Information Center reported.
Pike’s survival marks yet another milestone in that ongoing pattern of failure, as states continue to struggle with execution protocols that have repeatedly produced scenes of horror rather than the promised clinical finality.