A botched execution in Tennessee and a Trump administration proposal to livestream an execution by firing squad, ultimately rescinded, could prove watershed moments in the effort to end capital punishment in the United States. That is the view of Krisanne Vaillancourt Murphy, the executive director of the Catholic Mobilizing Network, a national death penalty abolition campaign.

The jolting developments over the last two weeks have laid bare the “barbarism” and false justifications of America’s capital punishment regime, Ms. Vaillancourt Murphy said. “In some ways, we’re seeing very clearly what we’ve known for a long time, which is that [the death penalty] is an absolute affront to human dignity.”

Americans who have grown skeptical of the institution already knew that it was administered in an arbitrary fashion, that it was discriminatory and that defendants who were poor or suffering from mental illness were more likely to be sentenced to death, she said. Many are already aware that hundreds who had been on death row have been exonerated in recent years. Now she believes many more people have been moved “toward wanting to end the death penalty, that this is just the last straw.”

Efforts to make executions more palatable have backfired, she said. Whether a government conducts its executions by lethal injection, gas, electrocution or firing squad, “there’s nothing normal about [the state] taking a life,” Ms. Vaillancourt Murphy told America in an interview on Oct. 13.

She called the failed execution of Christa Pike at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville on Sept. 30 a “circus,” describing how 911 operators had to be convinced they were not the victims of a prank call before dispatching paramedics and police to save the life of an inmate who had somehow survived two injections of pentobarbital.

‘Sheer vengeance’

Just eight days after that attempted execution, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that the execution of Nidal Hasan by firing squad would be livestreamed. Speaking with a correspondent from the conservative outlet “Real America’s Voice News,” Mr. Hegseth said, “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public, because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things.”

That plan was in the end overturned by President Donald Trump on Oct. 15 after the secretary’s proposal generated a storm of controversy. “Many very good and well meaning people would rather not watch [Mr. Hasan] die, through streaming, or through any other visual device,” the president wrote on social media. “He will die, as scheduled, by firing squad, but this event will not be streamed.”

Mr. Hasan, a former officer and Army Medical Corps psychiatrist, was convicted in 2013 by a military tribunal of killing 13 people and wounding 32 others in a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Tex., in 2009.

The Pentagon had earlier announced that the military execution, the first use of a firing squad since the end of World War II, would be conducted at Fort Hood on Dec. 3, the same date as Mr. Hasan’s rampage. “We’re going to do it at one o’clock, which is when he did it, and it’s going to be soldiers with rifles executing the firing squad,” Mr. Hegseth said.

The timing of the execution, the thwarted proposal to livestream it and Mr. Hegseth’s comments have made it clear that the killing of Mr. Hasan is not about justice or public safety but “sheer vengeance,” Ms. Vaillancourt Murphy said. She described it as a spectacle more typical of an authoritarian regime than a mature democracy. The execution of Mr. Hasan, she added, risks fulfilling his goal of martyrdom for Islamic extremism.

Ms. Vaillancourt Murphy said that she has been heartened by the public’s outrage at both the debacle in Tennessee and Mr. Hegseth’s initial plan to somehow broadcast the Hasan execution. “So many people have come out denouncing what we’re seeing,” she said. “This is not justice. This is pure vengeance. This is not American. This is not who we are. This tarnishes us. This stains our society.

“It speaks to our most base instincts, not to protecting human life and valuing the sacred dignity of every person.”

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops had issued a statement sharply condemning the Pentagon’s initial plans for the execution.

“It is with shock and great sorrow that I have learned of the Department of War’s decision to publicly livestream the execution of Nidal Hasan,” said Archbishop Paul Coakley, the conference’s president, in a statement released on Oct. 9.

“Our God is the God of life. In no way can [Mr. Hasan’s] actions be condoned but this decision is a barbaric promotion of a culture of death and must be reconsidered. The word of God exhorts us: ‘do not repay anyone evil for evil’ (Romans 12:17). The public execution even of one who has done grave harm will only further undermine the moral fabric of our nation and be a blight on the conscience of its people.”

In Rome on Oct. 9, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican secretary of state, told reporters: “It is truly incomprehensible that anyone would want to use this method in this day and age…. It is certainly unacceptable to turn death into a spectacle.”

In a statement released for the World Day Against the Death Penalty on Oct. 10, a few days before he was hospitalized for lung cancer surgery, Pope Leo XIV did not mention developments in the United States directly but reiterated church teaching on capital punishment.

“The death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person,” he said. “The common good can be safeguarded and the requirements of justice can be met without recourse to capital punishment: effective systems of detention have been developed that protect citizens while at the same time do not completely deprive those who are guilty of the possibility of redemption.”

And just hours after his audience with Pope Leo XIV, on Oct. 12, Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio, head of the U.S. Archdiocese for the Military Services, had issued a remarkable intervention against the proposed public execution, calling it a “spectacle of barbarically killing our adversaries.”

“As I would in the case of a procured abortion, I oblige any Catholics assigned to the firing squad to request to be excused from this action contrary to the teaching of the Church,” the archbishop said.

A political tool?

During his first term, Mr. Trump ended a decades-long moratorium on the federal death penalty, executing 13 people between 2020 and early 2021, the most overseen by a president in more than 120 years. According to Ms. Vaillancourt Murphy, Mr. Trump has been looking for an opportunity to revive capital punishment at the federal level since President Joe Biden commuted death sentences for almost all federal prisoners on death row during his administration.

In Florida, Gov. Ronald DeSantis has taken a similarly aggressive stance on capital punishment. After an unprecedented double execution in July, Mr. DeSantis said it was his intention to conduct an execution in Florida every two weeks.

Another double execution had been scheduled for Oct. 13, but Mr. DeSantis withdrew the death warrant for one death row inmate last week. In the end, only one Florida prisoner, James Robertson was executed.

Ms. Vaillancourt Murphy insisted that the enthusiasm for capital punishment shown by political leaders is not being matched by the general public.

She noted that Mr. DeSantis, who is Catholic, has pressed for a faster execution schedule as he has reached the end of his second term in Florida. State law limits the office to two terms. “We need to notice the fact that he’s likely going to be seeking another political office, so he’s using this as a moment to shine as ‘tough on crime,’” she said. “We need to be cautious about that and call it for what it is.”

“Politicians are going on the premise that society wants to be kept safe, that fear is going to earn you political points,” Ms. Vaillancourt Murphy said. “But I think what we’re really seeing is that people are no longer hoodwinked into believing that the death penalty is a deterrent, that it makes them any safer, that this is what victims want.”

Supporters often justify the death penalty as an opportunity for closure for the family members of victims of violence, but Ms. Vaillancourt Murphy believes capital punishment simply creates an obstacle to true healing. Were it off the table, as it is in most advanced economies around the world, the vast civic resources devoted to maintaining capital punishment could be diverted to accompanying and assisting traumatized family and friends of homicide victims.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, pursuing death penalty convictions ultimately results in judicial and penal costs that can be three to five times greater than the expenses associated with a conviction limited to life in prison.

A June Gallup survey found that the percentage of Americans who believe that the death penalty is morally unacceptable had risen to 39 percent, while the percentage who find it morally acceptable had fallen to a record low of 52 percent. Support for capital punishment has fallen drastically over the last two decades, from a high of 71 percent in 2006.

Given its teaching on human dignity and its pursuit of redemption and healing for both survivors of violence and the perpetrators of it, the Catholic Church is uniquely positioned to help the American public move to an abolitionist stance on capital punishment, according to Ms. Vaillancourt Murphy. “We need to always hold that window of hope open for the possibility of redemption,” she said. “When we choose to play God and take another life, we snuff that possibility out.”

The use of capital punishment was declared “inadmissible” by Pope Francis in 2018, an extension of revisions to church teaching on the death penalty begun by St. John Paul II. In his 1995 encyclical “Evangelium Vitae,” Pope John Paul II wrote that capital punishment is only appropriate “in cases of absolute necessity, in other words, when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society. Today, however, as a result of steady improvement in the organization of the penal system, such cases are very rare, if not practically nonexistent.”

Amnesty International reports that the number of executions administered by state actors surged 78 percent around the world in 2025, to more than 2,700, nearly double the 1,518 recorded in 2024. Globally the United States is not in good company in its acceptance of the death penalty.

According to Amnesty, just 17 nations worldwide executed prisoners in 2025, “in line with the historical low trends recorded since 2018.” Iran was responsible for most executions last year, with 2,159; followed by Saudi Arabia, 356; the United States, 47; Egypt, 23; Kuwait, 17; Singapore, 17; and Somalia, 17. (The 2025 count does not include the thousands of executions that Amnesty International believes continue to be carried out each year in China.)

Worldwide, 113 nations have abolished capital punishment, and more than 20 others maintain a practical moratorium on its use, Amnesty reports.