I’m going to start with an admission; I oppose the death penalty. There are several reasons for this. First, I consider it barbaric. Second, I am uneasy with the idea of the state wielding such irreversible power (especially given that most states are less competent than we, and they, would like to believe). Third, the line separating those eligible for execution from those not eligible is forever elastic; its scope is always subject to expansion and reinterpretation. Finally, and this is less a philosophical objection than an experiential one, I have stood inside an execution chamber, at the Walls Unit in Huntsville, Texas. It is not a place I ever wish to see again.

Despite these objections, I recognize that others regard capital punishment as not only permissible but necessary. For some, it offers security: a guarantee against those who commit extreme violence. For others, it represents a form of justice and retribution on behalf of victims and their families.

Yet there is, I suspect, at least one point of convergence. Whatever one’s stance on the death penalty itself, the act of execution carries a unique moral weight. The deliberate, state-sanctioned ending of a human life is not something that can be treated casually or incompetently. If executions are to occur at all, they must be carried out “properly.” But what counts as proper is far from settled.

This question—what it means to execute someone “correctly”—takes many forms. For the purposes of this discussion, however, we can reduce it to a deceptively simple issue: if executions are going to happen, then what methods of execution are (the most) acceptable?

Now, this is something about which I have previously written. On January 25^th, 2025, the state of Alabama executed Kenneth Eugene Smith using the experimental administration of pure nitrogen gas. Officials had suggested that the process would produce a swift and painless death. Instead, it took more than twenty minutes for Smith to die, and accounts from witnesses indicate that the experience was far from serene.

That case alone raises troubling questions, especially as the method has been taken up by other states. But if states are committed to capital punishment, why resort to unproven and experimental methods? Why not rely on more established protocols, such as pentobarbital, which has been the most common method of execution in the United States since the early 1990s? In other words, as the age-old idiom goes, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Yet, this is exactly what the US federal government has done with the Department of Justice’s publication of the Restoring and Strengthening the Federal Death Penalty report in April 2026.

Now, this is a sprawling document and not one that makes for light reading. The section that is of interest for us, however, is Section II. Here, the document outlines its case for other forms of execution, beyond the administration of pentobarbital. The three that it calls out by name specifically are firing squad, electrocution, and lethal gas. The document, however, does not explicitly limit itself to promoting just these three methods. Indeed, the whole document can be read as an affirmation of the death penalty, in all forms that can be said to be pragmatic and consistent with the Eighth Amendment (the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment).

Yet one can reasonably ask, as I did in my previous work, how we pick between different forms of execution. Is one form better than another? Should the method used come down to the personal preference of the individual who is going to die? If so, are we able to really say that they make a free decision (given that it concerns the way they’re going to have their life ended)? Or is it not a matter of perspective? Rather, is there an objectively better method of execution? Is it that which uses the least resources and is thus easiest to administer? Or is it that which provides the most powerful symbol of State and judicial power?

The answer, of course, is that even these “established” methods are problematic. Lethal injection, often presented as clinical, humane, almost antiseptic, brings with it ethical and practical complications. Pentobarbital, for instance, has been repeatedly scrutinized due to concerns about dosage reliability, the physiological experience of those subjected to it, and even just sourcing the stuff. Indeed, pharmaceutical companies have increasingly resisted supplying drugs for executions, forcing states to turn to compounding pharmacies or alternative protocols, often with limited transparency and oversight. And while the provision of executions is, like all else in the world, subject to material resourcing, the prospect of the method via which a state executes people being selected according to what it can manage (and maybe even what is cheapest), is not an appetizing one.

This introduces a central tension in the ethics of execution: the desire to make death appear orderly and humane, while operating within a system that is neither neutral nor straightforward. The aesthetics of executions matter more than we might like to admit (especially if you happen to live in a country or state where sentences are handed out). A procedure that looks calm, quiet, and clinical reassures witnesses and the public that justice has been carried out without unnecessary suffering. But appearances can be misleading. Paralytic agents, for example, may suppress visible signs of distress without alleviating the underlying experience of pain or suffocation. Like a duck on water—calm above, frantic beneath.

This raises a difficult question: is the goal to minimize suffering, or merely to minimize the appearance of suffering?

The distinction is significant. If the former, then execution protocols must be subject to rigorous, evidence-based standards akin to those in medicine. Yet this creates an uncomfortable overlap between healthcare and capital punishment. Medical professionals are, in most cases, explicitly prohibited from participating in executions. As the American Medical Association notes, “as a member of a profession dedicated to preserving life when there is hope of doing so, a physician must not participate in a legally authorized execution.” As a result, the design and administration of execution protocols often fall to individuals without the same level of clinical training or ethical accountability.

If, on the other hand, the goal is simply to produce a death that appears dignified or controlled, then we are engaged in something akin to theater. The risk here is that procedural formality replaces ethical scrutiny. An execution may be deemed “successful” not because it minimized suffering, but because it adhered to a script that avoided visible complications.

The case of Kenneth Eugene Smith illustrates this. The use of nitrogen hypoxia was framed as a technological solution, cleaner and more predictable. Yet the outcome suggests that innovation in this context may simply shift the underlying ethical problems. Experimental methods invariably bring uncertainty. And when the stakes involve the deliberate ending of a human life, uncertainty carries a particular moral weight.

There is also a broader issue at play: the extent to which the state should be experimenting at all. In most areas of public policy, experimentation is not only accepted but encouraged. However, executions are not policy pilots or iterative design processes; they are irreversible acts. A failed policy can be revised. A botched execution cannot.

This is where bioethics intersects most sharply with the philosophy of punishment. If capital punishment is justified on grounds such as deterrence or retribution, then its implementation must at least avoid introducing additional, unintended harms. Yet the history of execution methods, from electrocution to lethal injection to nitrogen gas, suggests a pattern of continual adjustment, often in response to failures. Each new method is presented as an improvement, yet each carries its own risks and uncertainties.

One might argue that this iterative process reflects a genuine attempt to reconcile punishment with humanity. But it could just as plausibly be read as evidence that the two are fundamentally in tension. The more we attempt to sanitize execution, the more we expose the difficulty, maybe even the impossibility, of doing so. We want to kill, but we want it to be clean. I doubt the two can be reconciled.

This leaves us in a precarious position. If there is no method of execution that can reliably ensure a death that is both humane and ethically defensible, then the insistence on finding one begins to look less like a technical challenge and more like a moral crusade. The question is not which method is acceptable, but whether the search for an acceptable method is itself misguided.

This, I think, is the deeper issue underlying debates about nitrogen gas, pentobarbital, or any other technique. The problem may not be that we have yet to find the right way to carry out executions. It may be that there is no “right” way to do so at all.