Why the clean execution that was meant for Christa Pike is anything but

After Tennessee unsuccessfully tried to execute Christa Pike last week, an ambulance whisked her to a Nashville hospital, where the condemned murderer became a patient in urgent need of lifesaving care.Should Pike recover from two botched administrations of pentobarbital, which left her unconscious and unable to breathe on her own, she might travel that road in reverse after she is well enough to be killed. The bizarre episode illustrates the perverse consequences of trying to disguise the brutal reality of capital punishment by dressing it in medical garb.Although most Americans say murderers like Pike should be executed, the method they prefer suggests they’re squeamish about admitting what that entails. Last year, Gallup put support for the death penalty at 52%, 28 percentage points lower than the peak recorded in 1994.

According to several surveys, Americans overwhelmingly view lethal injection, first adopted by Oklahoma in 1977, as “the most humane” method of execution, preferring it to firing squads, hanging, the electric chair and the gas chamber. The Supreme Court embraced that view in 2008, when it upheld Kentucky’s three-drug execution method, which critics portrayed as iffy and needlessly complicated.At that point, three dozen states had adopted lethal injection, which Chief Justice John Roberts portrayed as the result of “an earnest desire to provide for a progressively more humane manner of death.” As Roberts saw it, lethal injection was “more humane” than “the firing squad, hanging, the electric chair and the gas chamber.” But while lethal injection might look less ugly than those older methods, appearances can be deceptive. As Fordham University law professor Deborah Denno noted a few months before that decision, execution methods that are less painful to watch may not be less painful to experience.

“To me,” she told The New York Times, “the firing squad is the most humane,” although it is “perceived to be the most...