From Needles to Rifles in American Capital Punishment

In October, the Pentagon announced that the December 3 firing squad execution of Nidal Hasan, who killed 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009, would be livestreamed. No legal execution has ever been broadcast live in the United States, and Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth described the spectacle as a deliberate message about consequences. Trump has since reversed the plan after bipartisan backlash, saying Hasan will still die by firing squad but that it will not be streamed. This is the latest development in a chain of events that began when Europe tried to limit capital punishment by barring European manufacturers from supplying the United States with lethal injection drugs. Yet these export controls did not slow American determination to carry out executions; trade restrictions have brought about more substantial issues, including pushing states into secrecy and alternate sourcing, increasing drug unreliability, and catalyzing the uptick in the use of violent and archaic methods such as the firing squad.

The European Union has unequivocally opposed capital punishment since the 1990s, and its abolition has been a strict prerequisite for any country seeking to join. The 2011 amendment to the EC Regulation 1236/2005, which banned trade in materials used for torture and capital punishment, extended its scope to include pharmaceuticals. By adding thiopental, pentobarbital, and other short- and intermediate-acting barbiturates to the list of controlled goods, it barred manufacturers from exporting these drugs to the United States unless they could prove that the medicines would not be used for lethal injection. This set off a ripple effect, as companies with any production sequence in the EU faced legal consequences if their products were diverted to US death rows. It also amplified public relations risks for pharmaceutical corporations, as European investment funds began divesting from companies associated with execution drugs. For instance, in 2014, the German fund DJE Kapital sold $70 million USD of Mylan shares because the company would not guarantee that its muscle relaxant was not used in executions in the US.

In the years that followed, opposition spread well beyond European firms: Pfizer, Baxter, and Teva have announced strict opposition to the use of their products in capital punishment and set up distribution controls, from Pfizer’s restricted sales of seven products to Baxter’s contracts barring use for executions. The result is that today, virtually no major manufacturer will knowingly supply the United States any drugs traditionally used for capital punishment. This is notable, as the US comprehensively lacks an execution-drug industry, instead relying heavily on a handful of foreign-owned or foreign-funded firms. Although current regulations have choked the sector, capital punishment continues, as Washington has moved to protect it. A January 2025 executive order directed the Attorney General to take all necessary and lawful action to ensure that every state with capital punishment has enough lethal-injection drugs. The order sets a target for supply, but is vague on source and quality, leaving room for states to meet it through channels with little oversight. This reflects that lethal injection may have lost its medical legitimacy, but not its prominence. 

With verified drugs approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) becoming scarce on international markets, the US has countered the shortage by turning to compounding pharmacies and undisclosed channels with far less oversight than the medical industry lethal injection was built on. Compounding pharmacies are an attractive workaround for states because they only need a state pharmacy licence and don’t need to register with the FDA or disclose what drugs they make. Traditionally, they mix raw ingredients in-house to create tailored prescriptions, but some can operate more like manufacturers, producing large quantities of near-copies of commercial drugs. They operate outside the pharmaceutical industry’s distribution chain, making drugs far easier to obtain. The trade-off here is reliability: without FDA review, nothing guarantees a drug’s potency or sterility. On September 30, Tennessee death-row inmate Christa Pike survived two consecutive doses of pentobarbital after IV placement issues caused the chemicals to pool in her tissue rather than enter her bloodstream directly, which medical experts say was the most likely explanation. Yet Tennessee has not given lawyers any information about how it obtained the pentobarbital, how it was made, or how it was tested, so no one outside the state cannot say whether the drug itself was sound.

This phenomenon is particularly enabled by secrecy laws, which conceal vital information about the execution process. In Georgia, for example, the Lethal Injection Secrecy Act classifies the identities of drug manufacturers, suppliers, and prescribing doctors as confidential state secrets. While the stated purpose of these laws is to shield involved parties from harassment, they effectively undermine the reliability of these state operations. The Death Penalty Information Center reports that “in their efforts to obtain execution drugs, states have used secrecy laws to conceal evidence that they have broken state and federal laws, deliberately induced contract breaches, lied to or misled legitimate drug suppliers, contracted with shady international suppliers and questionable domestic pharmacies, and swapped drugs with each other without proper storage and transport controls.” Secrecy is what lets oversights continue, as it keeps suppliers out of reach of the courts that might otherwise question them.

Not only does the number of incidents of capital punishment appear unaffected by the European trade restrictions, but practitioners have been increasingly using more archaic methods of execution. In 2015, Oklahoma authorized nitrogen gas, and Utah reauthorized the firing squad, both as fallbacks in case lethal injection drugs could not be secured. Similarly, in 2021, South Carolina required prisoners to choose between the electric chair and the firing squad whenever lethal injection was unavailable. States have gradually been moving these methods from contingency toward default, a path Idaho completed on July 1, 2026. Following its failed attempt to execute Thomas Creech in 2024, the state of Idaho has made the firing squad its primary mode of execution, above lethal injection. 

Distrust has reached the condemned themselves. In March 2025, in South Carolina, Brad Sigmon chose the firing squad as his method of execution after his lawyers raised concerns about botched lethal injections and the state’s confidential protocol. However, the firing squad is not a comparable option to lethal injection concerning lack of suffering. In April 2025, Mikal Madhi was executed by firing squad in South Carolina. A pathologist from a state-commissioned autopsy concluded the bullets struck lower than expected, so Madhi likely stayed conscious for 30 to 60 seconds, two to four times the 15 seconds that South Carolina’s Supreme Court had expected. 

Europe’s pressure did not end American executions; if anything, they have pushed some toward more visible and violent forms. As pharmaceutical companies withdrew their drugs, states answered with secrecy and improvised sourcing. Where that failed, the failures became public. Public support for the death penalty has fallen to a 50-year low, and new death sentences remain low. Combined with the barriers created by Europe’s export controls, that should have meant fewer executions. Instead, capital punishment continues and has taken a more visible and violent form, from Idaho’s firing squad to the Pentagon’s plan to livestream Hasan’s execution. The public’s appetite has not grown. What has grown is officials’ willingness to carry out executions in plain view.

Edited by Benjamin Hanna

Featured image: “Death Chamber in Oklahoma. Photo by Josh Rushing is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0“