NACDL Calls to End the Death Penalty
October 1, 2026, 8:35 p.m.
WASHINGTON, DC — Following Tennessee’s botched execution of Christa Pike, the state’s second botched lethal injection since May, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) renewed its call to end the death penalty.
“Christa’s story lays bare the inhumanity of the death penalty, and of our entire criminal legal system,” said NACDL President Missy Owen. “Christa was only eighteen at the time of the crime – an emerging adult whose brain had not fully matured. She endured years of sexual assault beginning when she was a toddler. Yet she was sentenced to die. Over ninety percent of women in jails and prisons are victims of childhood trauma, including sexual abuse. It is unconscionable that women like Christa face the most extreme sentence our system can impose with no regard for the impact of that trauma. As criminal defenders, we witness this cruelty time and time again.
“In May, Tony Carruthers endured over an hour of injection attempts, groaning in pain as workers stuck him with needles over and over. Now it has happened again. We are told the death penalty is justice — that the state can answer the taking of a life by taking another, quietly and cleanly, in all of our names. A restrained human being pierced again and again while the state searches for a vein is what that promise actually looks like.”
“NACDL condemns the continued use of the death penalty in the United States, and the recent botched executions in Tennessee only highlight why punishment by execution is cruel, barbaric, and unconstitutional,” said Stephen Ross Johnson, NACDL President-Elect and past president of the Tennessee Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. “Experienced medical professionals most often do not feel they can ethically and morally participate in the state-sanctioned killing of another human being. That refusal is itself a moral verdict: the people trained to preserve life will not lend their hands to ending one. It is no wonder the recent executions in Tennessee appear to have been medically botched, causing unnecessary mental and physical pain and suffering. The state cannot make killing humane, because the killing itself is the inhumanity.
“All too often those facing execution are persons of color, are poor, are themselves victims of childhood neglect and abuse, and suffer from mental illness. And they often were represented at trial by lawyers who labored without effective resources, experience, or training, because states are unwilling to properly fund the defense function, even in cases where the stakes are literally life and death. State-sanctioned killing is an irreversible sentence rendered by a flawed system. When the state answers one death by deliberately causing another, and does it in pain, it does not restore what was lost. It only adds to it.”
Said NACDL Executive Director Lisa Wayne: “The repeated failures are not technical malfunctions. They expose a deeper moral truth: a government that sets out to take a life in order to answer the taking of a life cannot do so without inflicting the very cruelty the Constitution forbids. The state’s blatant disregard for the prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment should shock us all. But this is not a bug of our system; it is a feature. There is no humane way to kill a person who is already strapped down and helpless. A botched execution only pulls back the curtain. NACDL remains committed to capital defense and to the ongoing training and support capital lawyers need. Through education programs and resource-sharing, we will continue to help defenders fight for those sentenced to die at the hands of the government.”
The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers is the preeminent organization advancing the mission of the criminal defense bar to ensure justice and due process for persons accused of crime or wrongdoing. A professional bar association founded in 1958, NACDL's many thousands of direct members in 28 countries – and 90 state, provincial and local affiliate organizations totaling up to 40,000 attorneys – include private criminal defense lawyers, public defenders, military defense counsel, law professors and judges committed to preserving fairness and promoting a rational and humane criminal legal system.
