Click to expand Image Christa Pike appears in court in Nashville, Tennessee, April 12, 2012. © 2012 Dipti Vaidya/USA Today Network/Imagn Images via Reuters Today, Christa Pike remains unconscious on a ventilator, and in critical condition after the Tennessee government’s failed execution attempt. Doctors had warned that her medical condition could make the state’s execution method, lethal injection, exceptionally painful and cruel. In fact, it was barbaric. Authorities tried to insert an IV line for an hour on September 30, using at least seven needles in her left arm. One looked bent as they removed it. Two doses of lethal injection drugs left her unconscious, severely injured, but alive. This is the second botched execution in Tennessee over the last several months. Neither case is isolated: nationwide, around 7 percent of execution attempts by lethal injection have either resulted in prolonged visible suffering before death or, as in Pike’s case, left people alive, in some instances only barely. There may be far more suffering that we just can’t see: a federal magistrate judge in Ohio found the dose of one commonly used lethal injection drug is not enough to render the person sufficiently unconscious so they don’t feel “needless pain.”Arizona’s governor halted executions after three botched lethal injections in 2022. Ohio and Oklahoma have done the same. The list goes on: in fact, most states in the US now have formal or de facto moratoriums on executions by lethal injections. The reality is that there is no humane version of the death penalty. Human Rights Watch opposes the death penalty in all cases because it is an affront to human dignity, distinctly cruel, and often involves discrimination, arbitrariness, and error. Ninety-two countries have ratified a protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights that requires the abolition of the death penalty; the United States is not among them.The UN human rights chief, Volker Türk has called on authorities in Tennessee to halt all future attempts to execute Christa Pike. Tennessee Department of Correction Commissioner Frank Strada stepped down after the botched attempt, and the state governor has said they won’t try to execute anyone until they “find out what happened," but no decision has been made about Pike’s case. All states and the federal government should abolish the death penalty.