“I don’t expect that this one incident will be in itself the straw that breaks the camel’s back and leads to the abolition of the death penalty, but clearly it was deeply troubling, and clearly a lot of people are going to be troubled by it,” says Rick Garnett, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame.

“Most Americans who support the death penalty still believe that it needs to be administered in a way that’s humane, and that’s possible, but difficult, to do,” he adds. “The conversation about what we the people are going to do will be affected by” botched executions like the one Tuesday in Oklahoma.