SOURCE :- THE AGE NEWS
Columbus, Ohio: Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican candidate for governor of Ohio, was shocked by the recent botched execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee. “It’s unacceptable,” he says. For Ramaswamy, the lesson is clear: when you execute someone, it must be swift and effective.
“I do intend to resume executions in Ohio,” he told a recent function at the Columbus Metropolitan Club. “In the rare cases, for the most egregious crimes, where every element of the facts, the law, and even the backdrop and scale of consequence have been fully established.”
Ramaswamy said he was open to methods other than lethal injection. “It’s my responsibility to ensure that as we resume executions in Ohio, that we do so in a manner that is fully backed by every bit of scientific data, as well as every ethical backstop for doing this in the correct way in a constitutionally sanctioned way.”
The last person executed in Ohio was Robert Van Hook, who received a lethal injection in 2018 for the murder of David Self in 1985. Van Hook unsuccessfully argued the so-called gay panic defence: that he was the subject of an unwanted homosexual advance.
The failed attempt to execute Pike in Tennessee, and the Pentagon’s aborted plan to live-stream the firing squad execution of mass murderer Nidal Hasan, have brought the death penalty into the spotlight.
Ramaswamy is not alone in seeking to bring it back or expand its use. Several US states have passed laws in the past few years that authorise the death penalty as a punishment for people who sexually abuse children: Florida, Tennessee, Idaho, Alabama, Arkansas and Oklahoma.
The laws are designed to challenge a Supreme Court ruling from 2008 – Kennedy v Louisiana – which ruled the death penalty was not constitutionally permissible in child sexual abuse cases because it was reserved for the worst possible crimes: intentional homicide.
So far, no death sentences have been imposed under these laws. “When that happens, we’ll see that case percolate up through the courts and possibly to the United States Supreme Court,” says Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Centre.
President Donald Trump also wants to expand the death penalty. At a rally in Mississippi on Monday night, he pledged to pass federal laws authorising the punishment for large-scale drug dealers, human traffickers and “anyone who kills a police officer or a member of law enforcement”.
The number of executions has been climbing: from a modern low of 11 in 2021 to 47 last year. There have been 32 executions to date in 2026, with eight more scheduled before Christmas. Three are set for next Thursday, November 5.
One state accounts for an outsized proportion of those executions: Florida. The number of people put to death in the Sunshine State rose from zero at the start of the decade to a record 19 in 2025, and 18 so far this year.
“That’s all down to one person, and that’s Governor Ron DeSantis,” says Maher. While juries impose sentences, “he alone selects the people who will be executed, he signs their warrants, sets their execution dates and also decides their clemency petitions”.
This feature of Florida law predates DeSantis, a Republican. There is no oversight by courts or other state institutions. “It’s a really unprecedented concentration of power and authority in a single human being,” says Maher. DeSantis’ second and final term as governor expires at the start of January.
The state with the second-highest number of executions this year is Texas, where seven people have been put to death. Only four other states have executed people in 2026; three in Oklahoma, two in Alabama and one in each of Arizona and Tennessee.
What is happening in Florida partially obscures a broader shift away from the death penalty in the US. Most people being executed today were sentenced decades ago. The DPIC says 23 people were sentenced to death in 2025, compared to 317 in 1996. The number has been in the teens or low 20s for years.
And support for the death penalty has been falling since the 1990s. A long-running Gallup poll finds a bare majority – 52 per cent – of Americans favour the death penalty for a person convicted of murder.
Support is higher among Republicans (75 per cent) than Democrats (29 per cent), and slightly higher among people who didn’t graduate from university, according to an Economist/YouGov poll conducted this month.
Maher points out that while many conservative politicians aligned with Trump have introduced bills to expand the death penalty, most of them fail to become law.
“It does appear from that failure rate that a lot of the proposals were performative in nature,” she says. “We’ve had legislation introduced as a show of support or agreement for President Trump’s agenda.”
However, there is a move to expand the methods by which felons can be executed. In Idaho, firing squad is now the state’s primary execution method, following a law signed by Republican governor Brad Little last year.
Last year, South Carolina used a firing squad on three men, who chose that method over electrocution or lethal injection. The first was double murderer Brad Sigmon, who became the first person executed by firing squad in the US since 2010.
The second was Mikal Mahdi, who killed an off-duty police officer. His lawyers said the execution was botched; a pathologist they hired to analyse the autopsy concluded the three-member firing squad missed Mahdi’s heart, and instead he bled out while experiencing “excruciating conscious pain” for 30 to 60 seconds. The state denies this, citing its own autopsy.
A third South Carolina man, Stephen Bryant, was executed by firing squad in November 2025.
Alabama executed a man using nitrogen gas in early 2024 – the first person in the US executed by that method – and Louisiana followed suit last year. Mississippi, Arkansas and Oklahoma also allow nitrogen hypoxia, but haven’t used it.
Florida has authorised the use of execution by any means that has not been found to be unconstitutional, although this has not been tested because the state uses lethal injections.
The Death Penalty Information Centre does not take a view on the legality of capital punishment, but calls out problems with its implementation. That includes the fact that, according to the DPIC, at least 203 people who were wrongly convicted and sentenced to death in the US since 1973 have been exonerated.
“So long as human beings are involved in the administration of the death penalty,” says Maher. “We’re going to make mistakes.”
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Michael Koziol is the North America correspondent for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. He is a former Sydney editor, Sun-Herald deputy editor and a federal political reporter in Canberra.Connect via X or email.
