Florida’s uniquely horrifying death penalty system

The execution chamber in the Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville in 1984. | Jerry Cabluck/Sygma via Getty Images Late last month, the state of Tennessee attempted to execute Christa Pike, a woman who has been on death row for decades after killing a classmate as a teenager.  The execution failed: Pike survived two doses of the lethal injection drug pentobarbital, making her the first person ever to do so. The botched execution comes at a strange moment for capital punishment in America. Support for the death penalty has been declining for decades. And for a long time, the number of executions was falling, too. But since 2021, executions have been increasing again. The recent surge has been driven largely by one state: Florida. According to Pamela Colloff, who covers the criminal justice system for ProPublica and wrote about Florida’s use of the death penalty for New York Times Magazine this summer, 40 percent of the executions conducted in the US last year were in Florida. “There are so many things that make the administration of the death penalty interesting and unique in Florida,” Colloff explained on a recent episode of Vox’s The Gray Area podcast. “Among active death penalty states right now, Florida is unique...