Professor Tim Wilson takes the opportunity provided by a recent botched execution to reexamine the morality of state-sanctioned capital punishment.

Chapter 1: The botched execution

Christa Pike was supposed to die. The state of Tennessee had decided the date, the place, the method, and the chemical. And officials strapped her to a gurnie at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. They inserted introvenous lines. They administered Pento Barbital and she didn't die. So they administered the second set of lethal drugs permitted under Tennessee's execution protocol and she still didn't die. And witnesses reported Pike breathing, snoring loudly, apparently gasping. At one point, she raised her head. Uh, by the time the curtains closed a second time, I believe the sound was some sort of squeaking as well. Uh, she had reportedly complained about the sensation in her arm. Her spiritual advisor sang with her.

Eventually, the curtains closed. And then something extraordinary happened. Instead of removing Christa Pike's body from the execution chamber, Tennessee removed a living woman from the prison in an ambulance and took her to hospital. The state tried to kill her twice and failed twice.

Chapter 2: Arguments against the penalty

And there are moments when an abstract moral argument suddenly acquires flesh, blood, andbreath. And this is one of them. I oppose the death penalty. I oppose it for people I pity and for people I don't pity. I oppose it when the condemned person has a tragic history and when there is precious little mitigation at all because the central question is not whether Chrisa Pike committed something appalling. She did in 1995 when Pike was 18. She participated in the brutal murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. Slemmer was beaten and stabbed. The crime was prolonged and grotesque and uh Pike kept a piece of her skull, I think, as a momento. Nothing about opposing Pike's execution requires sanitizing what happened to Colleen Slemmer. Quite the reverse. Colleen deserves to be remembered as a human being rather than reduced to a footnote in someone else's execution story. The question is different. What does a civilized society do with someone who has committed an univilized act? And there are three reasons why I think the answer must not be execution. The first is fallibility.

Chapter 3: Institutional fallibility

Human institutions make mistakes. Judges make mistakes. Juries make mistakes. Per prosecutors make mistakes. Laboratories make mistakes. And governments make mistakes. And execution contains one characteristic which separates it from every other criminal punishment. There is no correction. If somebody is wrongly imprisoned, liberty cannot be restored retrospectively, but the prisoner can at least be released. Compensation is possible. A conviction can be quashed. A name can be cleared. Death has no appeal court. That alone should trouble us. But Tennessee has now demonstrated another sort of fallibility. Even when guilt is not disputed, the machinery of execution itself can fail. Pike's case was not Tennessee's first execution failure this year. In May, officials abandoned the attempted execution of Tony Kurthers after struggling for more than an hour to establish the required introvenous access. Now consider the grotesque paradox. We are repeatedly told lethal injection is clinical, controlled, orderly, and medicinal. Yet medicine exists to preserve life, not to finish it, not to end it. execution takes the paraphernalia of medicine, the needle, the introvenous line, the drugs, the monitoring equipment, and reverses their process. The white coat becomes camouflaged for killing, and when the supposedly clinical procedure fails, the disguise falls away. Pike's execution protocol reportedly contained a contingency for the first lethal dose failing, give another. But according to reporting on the protocol, there was no further instruction for what happens when the second dose fails as well.

Think about the philosophical absurdity of that. A government has constructed a procedure designed to extinguish human life yet reaches the end of its of its own instruction manual while the human being remains alive and at that point the death penalty ceases to resemble justice and begins to resemble bureaucratic improvisation.

Chapter 4: The cruelty of state killing

The second argument contains or concerns cruelty. An American constitutional law prohibits cruel and unusual punishment.

But forget legal terminology for a moment. Consider the ordinary meaning of cruelty. Pike apparently believed she was about to die. She was injected. She remained conscious. She reportedly asked whether her arm was supposed to feel the way it did. She received the second administration. She continued breathing. Witnesses heard loud snoring and gasping. Her lawyers sought emergency judicial intervention while the execution process itself was unfolding.

Whatever one's opinion of Christa Pike, there is something profoundly disturbing about all this. Punishment requires limits. We imprison people. We remove their liberty. We impose restrictions. We do so because justice sometimes requires coercion.

But civilization depends upon distinguishing punishment from vengeance. The murderer says, "You harmed me, therefore I shall destroy you." The state is supposed to say something different. The state says, "Law restrains violence." And once the state begins deliberately killing restrained prisoners, the philosophical distinction becomes harder to sustain.

Chapter 5: Defining the purpose of justice

That brings me to the third argument and I think the deepest. What is punishment for? Retribution, deterrence, protection, rehabilitation, public condemnation, spectacle. A whole life prison sentence protects society. A dangerous murderer locked securely inside a prison presents no ordinary threat to the public. No. So execution adds something else. Death. And what exactly does death now contribute? It doesn't resurrect the victim. It doesn't undo the crime. It doesn't restore the years stolen from a family. and it doesn't transform evil into good. It merely produces another deliberate death. Supporters of capital punishment answer that some crimes are so terrible that death is proportionate punishment.

And that argument deserves to be taken seriously. There is an intuitive moral force in it in retribution. If punishment bears no relationship to wrongdoing, justice itself starts looking arbitrary. Victims families also deserve far more consideration than they sometimes receive in philosophical discussions of capital punishment. Colleen's uh Colleen Slemmer's mother, Mary Martinez, travelled to Nashville expecting to see the sentence carried out. She later described what happened as a mess. Her suffering matters, her daughter's suffering matters. But justice cannot mean asking a bererieved family to participate in a ritual which promises closure and then produces another spectacle of suffering.

Chapter 6: Complexity of human culpability

There is another uncomfortable fact in Pike's story. Her defendant and boyfriend Tardel Ship was 17 at the timeof the murderer. At the time of the murder he was therefore ineligible for execution and received life imprisonment. Pike was 18. One year separated life from death.

Pike's lawyers also pointed to her later diagnosis of bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, her age at the time of the killing, and the allegations of severe abuse during childhood. None erases responsibility for Colleen Smer's murder. They do raise the broader question of whether human culpability fits neatly into the binary categories demanded by an execution chamber. Governor Bill Lee has now halted Tennessee's remaining execution scheduled for 2026 and ordered an independent review. He he said carrying out a death sentence is among the state's most serious responsibilities and must be legal, constitutional and effective. Quite so. But Christa Park's case leaves a larger question behind.

Suppose Tennessee investigates. Suppose officials identify precisely what went wrong. Suppose they redesign the protocol. Suppose the next execution proceeds flawlessly. Would that solve the moral problem? I don't think so.

Because the deepest objection to execution is not that governments sometimes execute people incompetently. It's that governments execute people.

Chapter 7: The moral case for life

The botched procedure merely strips away the euphemisms. An execution chamber is not fundamentally a medical facility. The prisoner is not a patient. The injection is not treatment. The objective is death. and Christa Pike entered Tennessee's execution chamber, condemned for taking a human life.

Tennessee then deliberately attempted to take hers and when that first attempt failed, the state tried again and then an ambulance arrived.

There's an almost unbearable symbolism in that final detail. Outside the prison waited people trained to preserve human life. Inside were people authorized to extinguish it. Eventually, the first group had to rescue the second group from the consequences of what they'd done. The ambulance represents the better instinct. When a human being lies unconscious, poisoned, and possibly dying, civilization sends doctors. It doesn't send another syringe.

The horror of Colleen Slemmer's murder does not become smaller because Christa Pike survives. Our condemnation of murder does not become weaker because we refuse to imitate the murderer. Quite the opposite. The strongest statement a society makes against killing is not you killed therefore we shall kill you. It is something harder. You killed you will answer for it. You will lose your liberty for the rest of your natural life.

We will not become executioners because justice should be stronger than vengeance and civilization should know when to put the needle down.

Edited 22 hours ago22 hr by sethoflagos
sp

Well I could write pages of polemic against the DP, but Mr Wilson has laid it out with clarity. It's all there, the capriciousness, the moral hypocrisy, the horrific implications of mistakes, the grotesque role we citizens play having a proxy contract killer act on our supposed behalf. (One who may, through incompetence, assume the mantle of torturer and the lifelong burden that may bring them)

BTW, when they insert the needles they first follow standard medical practice and cotton swab the injection sites with alcohol. Yeah. As in, we're killing you now but let's be safe and make sure you don't get an infection.

A perfect example of why the state has no business executing its own citizens.

A first lethal injection, followed half hour later by a second, while she was still speaking.
She could still be heard snoring, an hour later, before they rushed her to a hospital.

Might as well just hack at her neck, with a dull broadsword, over a chopping block.
Have we no shame ...

51 minutes ago, MigL said:

A first lethal injection, followed half hour later by a second, while she was still speaking.
She could still be heard snoring, an hour later, before they rushed her to a hospital.

Even if it wasn't botched, I believe there is some evidence that lethal injections are not painless, but the induced paralysis just makes it so that the onlookers won't see the suffering.

I am opposed to capital punishment and am glad I live in a country where it doesn't happen. However, if capital punishment is to be accepted, then there should only be ONE attempt, no more. If that attempt fails, it should be considered as a "pardon from God¹". Actually, I think Christa Pike should be freed from prison as a result of this "pardon from God". This implies that the amount of time on death row should be long enough that the "pardon from God" does not constitute an injustice to the victims.

¹ In the same sense that insurance companies use "act of God".

9 hours ago, KJW said:

I am opposed to capital punishment and am glad I live in a country where it doesn't happen. However, if capital punishment is to be accepted, then there should only be ONE attempt, no more. If that attempt fails, it should be considered as a "pardon from God¹". Actually, I think Christa Pike should be freed from prison as a result of this "pardon from God". This implies that the amount of time on death row should be long enough that the "pardon from God" does not constitute an injustice to the victims.

¹ In the same sense that insurance companies use "act of God".

Well now they are in a bind. I expect she will survive brain-damaged. So now what? Keep her alive? Or try to kill her again? Whatever hospital she is in won't have that on their premises.

I understand one problem they have with this lethal injection method is no company wants to make the drug they use to execute people.

The whole thing is barbaric. I understand this woman has spent her entire adult life on death row, waiting to be killed. Is that torment designed to be part of the punishment?

9 hours ago, KJW said:

I am opposed to capital punishment and am glad I live in a country where it doesn't happen. However, if capital punishment is to be accepted, then there should only be ONE attempt, no more. If that attempt fails, it should be considered as a "pardon from God¹".

Unfortunately the US Supreme Court has not seen it that way. Apparently the double jeopardy clause only is considered to apply to prosecution and not to execution. Romell Broom is a case where courts made this clear, and the result was barbaric. His execution failed in 2009, and a long round of litigation concluded with a new execution date set in 2022. He died from COVID before that date.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romell_Broom

47 minutes ago, exchemist said:

understand one problem they have with this lethal injection method is no company wants to make the drug they use to execute people.

Yep, drug shortages have led to legal battles based on the dubious supply chains now being used.

It's been my understanding that firing squads are actually the most merciful form of execution, with death being certain and nearly instantaneous, but of course they are messy and people are squeamish. (And I would guess that firing squads became too much associated with dictatorships, in the popular imagination?)

55 minutes ago, TheVat said:

And I would guess that firing squads became too much associated with dictatorships

Appropriate for the US, then ...

4 hours ago, TheVat said:

It's been my understanding that firing squads are actually the most merciful form of execution, with death being certain and nearly instantaneous, but of course they are messy and people are squeamish. (And I would guess that firing squads became too much associated with dictatorships, in the popular imagination?)

I saw a comment to the effect that they went away from them because they are violent, in order to appease this squeamishness, and that lethal injection is seen as more civilized, so it’s easier to accept. I think there’s merit in that.

My proposal: Firing squad by a randomly-chosen group of the legislators that voted for the death penalty. No blanks. Recusal only by resignation. Authority to impose the death penalty expires at the end of the legislative term.

The only time I’ve felt OK with the death penalty was with the DC/Beltway sniper of 2002 (one fatality occurred at a place at which I shopped). Which underscores why people who are traumatized by a crime should not decide on the punishment.

1 hour ago, swansont said:

I saw a comment to the effect that they went away from them because they are violent, in order to appease this squeamishness, and that lethal injection is seen as more civilized, so it’s easier to accept. I think there’s merit in that.

The outward sense of tranquility is probably the main reason. The EU has banned export of these drugs under Torture Regulations (autopsies from executed individuals find evidence of pulmonary edema, suggesting that they will have a silent drowning sensation.

1 hour ago, swansont said:

My proposal: Firing squad by a randomly-chosen group of the legislators that voted for the death penalty. No blanks. Recusal only by resignation. Authority to impose the death penalty expires at the end of the legislative term.

Yes, none of that "one rifle files blanks, so no one can say for certain they fired a kill shot" waffling. I second your motion.

2 hours ago, swansont said:

The only time I’ve felt OK with the death penalty was with the DC/Beltway sniper of 2002 (one fatality occurred at a place at which I shopped). Which underscores why people who are traumatized by a crime should not decide on the punishment.

Indeed. When I lived in Nebraska there was some child abuse case where a child was beaten and forced to swallow Drano. At that time I was completely fine with removing the parent from the face of the Earth by any means handy. (An irrational response on my part, not least because oblivion could have offered the perp respite from contemplating what they had done)