Jonah Goldberg: Do Death Penalty Opponents Share Blame for Botched Executions?

What Goldberg Is Arguing

In a new opinion column, Jonah Goldberg wades into one of the most emotionally charged corners of American policy: how we execute people, and why it so often goes wrong. His core claim is uncomfortable by design — that the activists and pharmaceutical companies who successfully pressured drugmakers to stop supplying lethal injection chemicals haven't ended the death penalty, they've just made it messier. States that still allow capital punishment have been forced to improvise, turning to untested drug combinations, compounded pharmacy mixtures, and in some cases methods like nitrogen gas, because the clean, clinical lethal injection protocols of the past are no longer easy to source.

Goldberg uses recent cases, including the Christa Pike case out of Tennessee, as a jumping-off point to argue that good intentions aren't the same as good outcomes. If the goal of anti-death-penalty advocacy was to make executions rarer and more humane, he contends, the actual effect of the drug-supply campaigns has sometimes been the opposite: longer, more unpredictable procedures that generate the very horror stories opponents point to as evidence capital punishment should end.

Why This Argument Is Controversial

This is a classic "unintended consequences" argument, and it's guaranteed to frustrate people on both sides. Death penalty opponents will say Goldberg is blaming the messenger — that the real responsibility lies with states choosing to carry out executions at all, not with advocates trying to stop a practice they view as fundamentally wrong. Supporters of capital punishment, meanwhile, may use the column to argue for streamlining execution methods rather than reconsidering the practice itself.

The underlying facts aren't in serious dispute: major pharmaceutical companies in the U.S. and Europe have refused to sell drugs for use in executions since the early 2010s, partly due to activist pressure and partly due to their own ethical and business concerns. That shortage is well documented and has reshaped execution protocols across multiple states.

The Bigger Picture

What makes this debate durable is that it sits at the intersection of law, ethics, and logistics. Courts have repeatedly been asked to rule on whether a given drug protocol constitutes "cruel and unusual punishment," turning pharmacology into a constitutional question. Meanwhile, states keep searching for workarounds — firing squads, nitrogen hypoxia, compounded drugs — each raising its own set of legal and moral objections.

Goldberg's column won't settle that fight. But it reframes a familiar debate: instead of just asking whether the death penalty is right or wrong, it asks who bears moral responsibility when a policy fight produces outcomes nobody intended.