On the night Tahina Corcoran watched the state kill her husband at the Indiana State Prison, she rushed back to her car as fast as she could. It was around 1 a.m. on December 18, and she had already checked out of her hotel. “I knew before we headed to the prison for the execution that I would most likely want to get as far away from Michigan City as possible,” she said. She didn’t stop to talk to anyone. “I hated everybody there.”
She broke down when she got inside the car. Tahina’s 30-year-old son Justin, who also witnessed the execution, tried to comfort her. Then they started the two-hour trip back home. They didn’t discuss what they had seen. “I just kept thinking, ‘I gotta get me home, I gotta get me and my son home.’”
The following days were a blur. She was in shock and felt numb. She’d had the foresight to finish all her holiday preparations long before the execution. “Everything was wrapped, all the decorations were up, all the food was bought for Christmas dinner,” she recalled. So she focused on retrieving her husband’s remains, picking them up just before New Year’s. “And as I was carrying his box of ashes, I just remember thinking to myself, ‘Wow, this is our first actual car ride together.’”
Tahina, 48, had known Joseph Corcoran since middle school. Over his 26 years on death row, she actually married him twice: first about five years after he was sentenced to die, and again two months before his execution. Her two kids, now grown, had been raised to know Corcoran and why he was on death row. “They knew that, you know, Joe was sick and that he was in prison,” Tahina said. “And they just knew that their mommy was very happy with Joe, and Joe was always a part of our family.”
Corcoran was 22 years old when he shot his brother, James, and three other men in Fort Wayne. His lawyers would argue that his actions were driven by undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenia. From the start of his incarceration, Corcoran was convinced that prison guards were using an ultrasound machine to force him to speak. He repeatedly said he wished to drop his appeals and volunteer for execution. Although prosecutors accused him of faking his delusions, Tahina saw them firsthand. “He was very mentally ill,” she said. “And Joe believed that the only way that he could escape this torment and torture was by dying.”
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Corcoran was the first person executed by the state of Indiana in 15 years. As in many places, the state’s execution chamber had remained dormant due to a lack of available drugs used to carry out lethal injection. But in June 2024, then-Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb made an announcement. “After years of effort, the Indiana Department of Correction has acquired a drug — pentobarbital — which can be used to carry out executions,” he said. Within months, at the state attorney general’s request, the Indiana Supreme Court had scheduled two execution dates: Corcoran on December 18, and Benjamin Ritchie on May 20, 2025.
Indiana’s new drug protocol — a single, massive dose of pentobarbital — was the same formula used by the federal government, which carried out 13 executions at the U.S. penitentiary in Terre Haute during President Donald Trump’s first term. Death penalty states had adopted the one-drug method despite doubts over its efficacy and turned to compounding pharmacies to obtain it. But the results could be disturbing. Some people executed with the pentobarbital appeared to suffer on the gurney, and autopsies consistently showed pulmonary edema — fluid in the lungs that, according to experts, would feel like drowning.
“Joe knew that he was kind of a guinea pig,” Tahina said. He wanted an autopsy to be carried out after his death, she said, because he knew something could go wrong. He also allowed a journalist with the Indiana Capital Chronicle to be added to his personal witness list — a way to circumvent a state ban on media witnesses. But in the end, things seemed to go mostly according to plan. The curtains went up at 12:34 a.m. Corcoran was declared dead 10 minutes later. “After a brief movement of his left hand and fingers at about 12:37 a.m.,” the journalist reported, “Corcoran did not move again.”
But the execution of Benjamin Ritchie five months later did not go smoothly. Tahina was watching the livestream of a vigil outside the prison hosted by Death Penalty Action that night, when viewers received word that Ritchie had moved unexpectedly on the gurney. “He violently sat up — raised his shoulders — and twitched violently for about three seconds,” one defense attorney told reporters.
Tahina was horrified. But it wasn’t until she read additional coverage weeks later that she began to question what she had seen at her husband’s execution. One expert said that pentobarbital “should be really, really effective — really fast. No one should move.” This had not been the case with Corcoran. “You could see his hands twitching,” Tahina said. This echoed the initial news reports. But she also saw something other witnesses did not: “Joe tried to raise his head up.” Justin, who was sitting behind her, described the same thing. “To me, he tried to sit up, or at least it looked like it,” he said.
“How was I supposed to know that wasn’t normal?”
Tahina felt sick, then angry. “How was I supposed to know that wasn’t normal?”
She grew even more alarmed when she heard comments in the news from Indiana’s newly inaugurated Republican Gov. Mike Braun. His predecessor, Holcomb, had announced the state’s procurement of pentobarbital in June 2024 — six months before Corcoran’s execution. But Braun had since told reporters that the drugs only had “a 90-day shelf life” — and that the state had previously gotten “in a pickle” by purchasing pentobarbital that expired before it could be used.
Braun insisted that neither of the executions were carried out with expired pentobarbital. But Tahina didn’t believe him. His claims were confusing and contradictory. Shortly after Ritchie’s execution, Braun told reporters that the state had no more pentobarbital — and no plans to buy more. “We’ve got to address the broad issue of, what are other methods, the discussion of capital punishment in general,” he said. But just a few weeks later, his attorney general requested to schedule a third execution.
Today, Tahina has more questions than answers. “I want to know what happened,” she said. As Indiana prepares to kill again this week, she is furious at the lack of transparency and accountability surrounding executions — as well as the apathy of the public toward the people executed in their name.
But she is especially enraged at the thought that her husband’s execution will be swept under the rug. “All of those people — the governor, everybody — have moved on. No big deal. But it’s a big deal to me. And it’s a big deal to my family. And I want the public to know what really goes on.”
A printed photo of Tahina Corcoran posing with her husband Joseph Corcoran at the Indiana State Prison in October 2024. Photo: Liliana Segura
Just after midnight on Friday, October 10, barring any last-minute intervention, Indiana will execute 53-year-old Roy Ward by lethal injection. Despite the questions still swirling around the last two executions, the method will be the same as the one used to kill Corcoran and Ritchie. “No changes have been made to the execution protocol since Mr. Ritchie’s execution,” the Indiana attorney general’s office wrote in a federal court filing last month. Although there was a debrief and “verbal review” among members of the execution team, “a formal investigation or post-execution review was not conducted.”
Indiana’s revival of capital punishment is part of a wider resurgence across the country. The midnight execution will be the first of six executions in seven days, with death sentences subsequently set to be carried out in Florida, Missouri, Mississippi, Texas, and Arizona. To date, 34 people have been executed in the U.S. this year alone, with 10 more executions scheduled before the end of 2025. While the vast majority have been killed by lethal injection, two have been killed using nitrogen gas and another two by firing squad.
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Designed to resemble a medical procedure, lethal injection is still widely perceived as the most humane form of execution. But states have spent the past two decades retooling their formulas due to key drug shortages. As states have experimented with different drug combinations, manufacturers have been increasingly reluctant to supply products for lethal injection, prompting officials to seek out less reputable sources. To escape scrutiny, states have also passed legislation to make their drug sources secret — ostensibly to protect drug suppliers from anti-death penalty activists.
Today, all death penalty states hide the sources of their lethal injection drugs. But Indiana stands apart for its secrecy. It is the only active death penalty state that prohibits media witnesses from attending executions. While other states offer a designated media area on prison grounds, along with a chance to hear from witnesses, the Indiana Department of Correction provides a parking lot across the street and a brief statement delivered by email.
Indiana is the only active death penalty state that prohibits media witnesses from attending executions.
Until recently, there was almost no publicly available information about the drugs used by the Indiana Department of Correction. This changed in late September with a series of state disclosures to Ward’s attorneys as part of federal litigation challenging his execution. Death penalty attorneys had spent months asking for records pertaining to the acquisition, storage, and destruction of the drugs. According to the state, “the pentobarbital arrived in a sealed cardboard box with a Styrofoam container inside.” The package contained the drug vials along with “inventory slips and certificates of analysis.” At the prison, the pentobarbital is put in “a safe behind three levels of locks,” the state wrote. “Three Indiana State Prison employees have the ability to unlock the safe.”
But the biggest revelation was that, according to the state, the Indiana Department of Correction does not rely on compounded pentobarbital as previously suspected but instead uses manufactured pentobarbital, procured from an unnamed pharmacy, to carry out executions. Although the source of the drugs remains secret, the presiding judge privately reviewed photographs, labeled “Highly Sensitive Documents,” and concluded that the evidence supported the state’s claims.
This was especially surprising in light of the 90-day shelf life invoked by the governor earlier this year, which strongly hinted at compounded pentobarbital, since compounded drugs are known to degrade faster than manufactured drugs. And it only deepened confusion over why Indiana has apparently destroyed at least three unused doses of pentobarbital, as revealed in records previously released through separate litigation. The heavily redacted documents include Drug Enforcement Administration forms documenting the destruction of the drugs through dubious means. One dose was destroyed by fire in June at a penitentiary three hours south of Michigan City. Another two doses were destroyed in July at the Indiana State Prison. The method of destruction reads “Poured in kitty litter.”
“Our biggest concern was that compounded pentobarbital was going to be used,” said Indiana defense attorney Joanna Green, who represents Ward. “We know now that it’s not.” Ward’s legal team has since dropped their remaining federal challenges, filing a joint motion requiring the state to show that it complied with its own protocol when executing Ward. “There are still a lot of questions about how Indiana obtains manufactured pentobarbital,” Green said. “And there are still significant questions about what happened in the previous two executions.”
Not long after Ritchie’s execution, Tahina got a message via Facebook from a woman in Canada named Colleen Villeneuve. Tahina had been responding to cruel comments about Ritchie and the woman wanted to say thank you. She introduced herself as Ritchie’s girlfriend.
“Nobody wants to be connected with somebody through these circumstances,” Villeneuve told me. But the two women quickly bonded. For people whose loved ones are executed by the state, the experience can be crushingly isolating. “It’s not the same as when anyone else dies,” Villeneuve said. “You have to deal with not only them being killed, but you have a whole army of people who talk bad about the person.”
Villeneuve had not witnessed Ritchie’s execution. She was at her hotel a few miles away when she heard the first reports from outside the prison about his violent movement on the gurney. Another lawyer sent her a text message saying the execution had gone quickly — “and that’s what I focused on.”
Villeneuve had first written to Richie six years earlier. Before that, “I’d never been to a prison, I’d never talked to anyone that was in prison.” But she stumbled upon a documentary on YouTube starring famed British journalist Trevor McDonald, who gained rare access to the penitentiary in Michigan City. Among those interviewed was Ritchie, a tattooed 30-something who talked bluntly about his life and his crime with a mix of self-reflection and bravado.
Ritchie was 20 years old when he shot a police officer during a botched robbery. Although he disputed the state’s version of events — prosecutors said he ambushed his victim, while Ritchie said he fired while running away — he did not deny his guilt. He was a “stupid kid,” he said. “I would do things without thinking about ’em.”
Villeneuve was struck by Ritchie. “He just didn’t fit, you know, the Ted Bundy type” she imagined to be on death row. Instead, she saw a man acting “full of himself,” trying to be tough for the cameras. On a whim, she wrote to Ritchie, who replied with “the most ridiculous letter,” trying to “make himself sound cool and available.” Nevertheless, the two kept writing. A year later, Villeneuve went to visit Ritchie for the first time.
The closer Villeneuve became to Ritchie, the less he resembled the swaggering convict he tried to portray in the documentary. She found him to be a funny, compassionate man who would do anything for his cat, Cletus, a black and white shorthair whom he’d raised as part of the prison’s cat therapy program. She was also confronted with his painful family history. As his lawyers would explain in his clemency petition, Ritchie’s childhood was filled with trauma and neglect that shaped his early life. When he was 10 years old, Ritchie was sent to a psychiatric facility, where he “attempted suicide and told hospital staff he felt like ‘everyone would be better off if I were dead.’”
Ritchie seemed determined to help Villeneuve raise her own daughter, Shiloh, with the love he’d lacked growing up. In a letter asking for clemency, Villeneuve wrote that he had been “instrumental with her growth. … Shiloh enjoys nothing more than to tell Benjamin about a test she aced or a new move she learned in kick-boxing.” In the days leading up to his execution, Shiloh shared videos he sent via a contraband cellphone on TikTok.
An undated photo of Benjamin Ritchie posing in his death row cell with his cat, Cletus, at the Indiana State Prison. Photo: Colleen Villeneuve
Ritchie had never really dwelled on the state’s plan to kill him. “He didn’t think they were ever going to,” Villeneuve said. In the documentary, he pointed out that “a lot of us are getting off death row” — and the odds were indeed in his favor. Until Corcoran’s execution last December, only 20 of the 97 people sentenced to die in Indiana’s “modern” death penalty era had died at the hands of the state. The majority have been removed from death row due to reversals by appellate courts, commutations, or deals reached with prosecutors.
Villeneuve was less optimistic about Ritchie’s chances of surviving death row. Still, in retrospect, she said she was in denial too. She and Ritchie did not discuss any end-of-life preparations “I honestly didn’t think we were going to get to that,” she said.
The last time she saw him was on video, right before they came to take him away, she said. What came next is contained in affidavits later filed in court. Witnesses were led into the small room. The curtains went up at 12:35 a.m. A couple minutes in, Ritchie suddenly raised up his torso from the gurney, pushing hard against the restraints before collapsing back down. One witness gasped and grabbed one of the attorneys by the arm. “I don’t think I can do this,” she said, bowing her head. When she looked back up, he was gone.
In August I went to see Tahina at her home in a rural suburb about an hour from Fort Wayne. Corcoran’s paintings hung throughout the house; on her refrigerator was a handwritten letter from Corcoran listing songs he liked. “Remember me when you listen,” it said. In the living room, a blue urn holding Corcoran’s ashes were displayed in a large wooden cabinet.
Tahina had shared Corcoran’s private autopsy report, giving me permission to send it to two different experts. But both said that the reports did not contain sufficient detail to draw any firm conclusions about whether his execution had been botched. Although it noted congestion in Corcoran’s organs — one potential sign of pulmonary edema — his lungs were not as heavy as those seen in other autopsies of people killed by lethal injection.
Tahina found the lack of clarity frustrating. She was still trying to make sense of her husband’s death. Yet much of the visit centered on his life. She showed me the top she wore to his execution — a gray sweatshirt stamped with a pink palmprint reading “Joseph Corcoran touched this heart” — along with a scrapbook stuffed with photos, handmade greeting cards, and newspaper clippings. There were pages of wedding pictures; she had the request Corcoran submitted seeking permission to marry her in 2004 and the index cards with the handwritten script from their ceremony 20 years later.
Tahina had asked her son Justin to join us, along with Corcoran’s spiritual adviser, Rev. David Leitzel, who knew Corcoran’s family from his church. Whereas Tahina’s early recollections of Corcoran were of a school crush on a boy who dressed like Wally Cleaver from “Leave It to Beaver,” Leitzel remembered a child who seemed slightly out of step with his peers. “If I pull up pictures, you’ll be hard pressed to find one of Joe smiling,” he said.
Conversations about Corcoran were haunted by the death of his parents. They were murdered in 1992, five years before Corcoran committed the killings that sent him to death row. Corcoran was tried as a juvenile for his parents’ murders but acquitted. Many believed he did it. Although Tahina didn’t, she also questioned why he never received the help he clearly needed afterward. If he’d been properly diagnosed and medicated, she said, he might have been able to live a normal life outside prison.
Instead, like many condemned people with mental illness, Corcoran’s delusions worsened during his decades on death row. Tahina read one of his later letters aloud, in which he chronicled a “typical day.” It began with a harrowing account of trying to sleep, which he could only do by conjuring violent images of killing prison officers. “That is the nonsense the people who man the ultrasound surveillance devices put me through whenever I try to sleep,” he wrote. The mind control technology dictated his thoughts, speech, and muscles, he wrote, causing pain and involuntary movement throughout his body. “That is why people around me think I have Tourettes.”
Leitzel was disturbed by the letter. He had never heard Corcoran talk that way. Tahina said Corcoran probably hid his delusions from Leitzel because he felt ashamed. But the two also shared many of the same positive impressions of Corcoran. He was highly intelligent, had a sense of humor, and was deeply devout. To Tahina, he was the closest thing there was to a soulmate. “He could always make me smile.”
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Throughout my visit to their home, Justin had mostly listened. He had not wanted to attend the execution. But he had gone to support his mother. When it came time to describe what he saw, he spoke quietly and deliberately. “It’s been almost a year and I’m still having nightmares,” he said.
The days before were a blur. He remembered sharing Corcoran’s last meal with him, which was served several days before the execution. The warden brought several pints of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, which they ate as a family. It was then that the warden ran down the logistics of what would happen on the night of the execution.
The vans had picked them up from their hotel around 10 p.m. They arrived at the prison, went through security, and were taken to a building toward the back of the sprawling penitentiary. It was after 12:30 a.m. when they were led to the witness chamber, a cramped room with two rows of chairs facing a small window. The lights were lowered. At 12:34 a.m. the blinds were raised. Corcoran was strapped down to the gurney, with Leitzel by his side.
Tahina stood in front of a living room window to recreate the scene. “I had a full view of my husband’s body,” she said. But she could not hear anything in the chamber. Nor could she tell when the drugs were actually delivered. But she was firm that Corcoran moved. “He went like this,” she said, straining her head forward. “And tried to raise up.”
“Yeah,” Justin said. “He looked like he was trying to look,” he said, turning his own head to the side.
“And then he literally tried to raise the top part of his body,” Tahina said. She went over to the couch and laid down with her arms out, acting out what she had seen.
Although he was sitting beside him in the death chamber, Leitzel did not see Corcoran move. But he conceded that his eyes were closed in prayer the whole time. He also said something startling. Looking out from the death chamber, he could not see the witnesses at all. He realized that the window between the rooms was made up of one-way glass. Corcoran had always told Tahina that her face was the last thing he wanted to see before he died. But in the end, he could not see her at all.
Tahina, meanwhile, cannot escape the images from that night. “Once you see it you can’t unsee it,” she said. “So I try to keep my mind scrambled, I try to keep everything busy, busy, busy in my head all the time.” If she doesn’t, she said, taking a deep breath, “All I can see is my husband strapped down on that gurney.”
The post Indiana Killed Their Partners Under Cover Of Darkness. They Want Answers. appeared first on The Intercept.
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