More Perfect: Cruel and Unusual

Matt Kilty and Karen Duffin open by connecting the episode’s 2016 death-penalty story to current events. On September 30, Tennessee administered two doses of pentobarbital to Krista Pike, but she continued breathing, lifted her head, looked around, and said a spot was burning; attorneys said she remained alive in critical condition. On October 7, Pete Hegseth announced that Trump had approved a livestreamed December firing-squad execution at Fort Hood for an Army major convicted of killing Americans. Public backlash led the administration to retreat and cancel it. The show then replays More Perfect’s inaugural episode before returning to the present.

In 2010, Maya Foa was volunteering at the UK legal organization Reprieve when its head, Clive Stafford Smith, asked whether she could identify the source of sodium thiopental scheduled for Jeffrey Landrigan’s execution in Arizona that night. If the drug was not FDA-approved, lawyers might stop the execution. Foa expected to spend 30 minutes researching whether a UK supplier could legally ship it to the United States. She found no authorized UK supplier and submitted an affidavit, leading a court to stay the execution. While she slept in London, Arizona appealed to the Supreme Court; the justices voted 5–4 to lift the stay, and Landrigan was executed at 22:26 hours.

A nationwide shortage began after the only remaining U.S. manufacturer of sodium thiopental stopped production. States exchanged supplies—California thanked Arizona for being “lifesavers”—and Arizona obtained drugs from an undisclosed English source. Foa traced the supply chain through active ingredients made in Austria, packaging in Germany, and distributors in the UK until documents revealed the name Dream Pharma. A colleague visited its address in West London and found a tiny storefront marked “Elgon Driving Academy.” Its owner, Medi Alavi, confirmed he had supplied the states but said it was no longer legal. Reprieve alerted the UK government, which invoked its anti-torture export rules and stopped the shipments.

After the UK block, states searched internationally: Missouri looked to Germany, Hospira considered producing the drug in Italy, and Florida, Ohio, Alabama, and 11 other states turned to Danish company Lundbeck. Lundbeck executive Anders Schroll said the company was in business to save lives and was shocked that its medicine was being used for executions. Even Indian suppliers, despite India retaining capital punishment, asked why states would use life-saving medicines to kill people. Foa’s campaign eventually led more than 20 companies to restrict the use of their drugs in executions. As supplies disappeared, states began experimenting with new drug combinations and other execution methods.

Karen explains that Oklahoma legislator Bill Wiseman initially opposed capital punishment, but in 1976 voted to reinstate it because 80 percent of his constituents supported it and he feared losing his seat. Feeling he had done wrong, he asked medical experts for a humane method. State medical examiner Jay Chapman dictated a recipe: an ultra-short-acting barbiturate, a chemical paralytic, and saline delivered intravenously. Oklahoma adopted it, Texas followed the next day, and lethal injection eventually accounted for 88 percent of U.S. executions. Wiseman later became a pastor and anti-death-penalty advocate, saying he had extended the system he regretted creating.

The three-drug cocktail reflects competing goals: the final drug represents punishment, the anesthetic represents mercy, and the paralytic has no medical purpose. It was included so witnesses would not see movement if the anesthetic failed. That matters because potassium chloride can feel like fire moving through the veins; a conscious prisoner could be paralyzed and unable to signal that he was suffering. Foa pursued the anesthetic because the Supreme Court said in 2008 that its successful delivery was necessary to prevent severe pain. As reliable supplies vanished, executions became visibly chaotic, including Clayton Lockett’s 2014 Oklahoma execution, which involved thrashing, gasping, and 43 minutes of dying.

In a later lethal-injection case, Justice Alito argued that executions could be painless but abolitionists had made effective drugs unavailable by pressuring manufacturers. Justice Scalia called the campaign a “guerrilla war against the death penalty,” suggesting opponents should change the law openly rather than create constitutional problems through drug scarcity. Foa rejected that framing: manufacturers, distributors, pharmacists, European governments, and Indian companies independently refused to participate in executions. The host asks whether the campaign nevertheless made executions crueler by forcing states toward riskier methods. Foa’s answer is that states, not she, were chasing replacement drugs, and there was no evidence botched executions had increased—only that journalists were paying closer attention.

Utah legislator Paul Ray said the drug shortage prompted him to propose firing squads. The procedure uses a chair, hood, heart target, five riflemen, and one supposedly unknown blank round; lawmakers approved it if lethal injection drugs were unavailable. Ray argued it was more humane because death came within seconds, unlike an uncertain injection. A volunteer named Kenny described his father’s firing-squad team as expert marksmen who gathered for breakfast, prayer, and moral preparation before executions. Kenny said supporters had to acknowledge the method’s savagery. Death-penalty advocate Robert Blecker agreed that firing squads are more honest than lethal injection, but opposed the blank round because participants should accept responsibility.

The episode contrasts abolitionist Maya Foa with people who support capital punishment but distrust lethal injection. Blecker said executions should look like punishment rather than resemble hospice care, where a dying person lies on a gurney under white sheets with an IV and medical staff. Karen notes that the Supreme Court had already upheld firing squads, electrocution, and other methods, but Justice Breyer wrote in 2014 that the Court should reconsider the more basic question of whether the death penalty itself is constitutional. The dispute therefore moves beyond selecting a drug to whether the state should kill prisoners at all.

Harvard professor Carol Steiker tells Karen that Supreme Court abolition is unlikely under its more conservative membership, but new death sentences have fallen by more than 90 percent. Life without parole now exists as an alternative in every death-penalty state; improved mitigation evidence, protections for intellectually disabled people, mental-illness findings, and the cost of separate guilt and sentencing trials also reduce death sentences. Former death-row prisoner Damien Eccles, wrongly convicted in Arkansas at 18 and imprisoned for 18 years, still sees no simple answer: some prisoners might kill again, but the system remains politically, geographically, and racially arbitrary. He strongly opposed livestreaming executions, warning that viewers—especially children—would be permanently changed.

Eccles said execution decisions can depend on a slow news day, prosecutorial politics, poor lawyers, or events such as the 1990s satanic panic. Steiker pointed to Texas, where more than 200 of 254 counties have executed no one since 1976 while a small group drives the state’s totals. Karen and Matt conclude that the country may be in another pendulum swing between justice and mercy rather than moving steadily toward abolition. As the episode was published, California Governor Gavin Newsom commuted the sentences of all 548 people on the state’s death row—about a quarter of U.S. death-row prisoners—in the largest mass commutation in American history.