The argument for the death penalty has always relied on primitive emotions. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life. The case against has tended to depend on an appeal to reason. The danger of a wrongful conviction. The sanctity of life and the possibility of redemption. The presumption against state killing except in a just war.
The botched attempt to execute Christa Pike, however, adds some atavistic emotion to the case against capital punishment. The horror of media witnesses hearing breathing and snoring after the administration of two doses of supposedly lethal pentobarbital speaks for itself.
Journalists were asked to leave the room and 15 minutes later the emergency services arrived, as the state switched from trying to kill the convict to trying to keep her alive.
Nothing can diminish Pike’s crime – she tortured and killed a fellow student in a jealous rage 31 years ago – but the inhumanity of her treatment over the years should give any advocate of the death penalty pause for thought.
She was sentenced to death in 1996 and, since then, legal arguments have gone back and forth. As Victoria Richards writes today, Pike’s “very existence since has been treated like a ‘Will they, won’t they?’ plotline; a Hunger Games-style gladiatorial fight”. Those arguments continued in the hours before her attempted execution, with a late stay of execution granted and then overturned.
The psychological torture of these legal twists and turns, and the practical difficulties of killing a person in a “humane” manner, are not incidental to the death penalty; they are an inevitable part of it.
The technology of justice has often been its weakest point. The guillotine became the favoured method of execution in the French Revolution because of the unreliability of hanging. Ironically, it was named after Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, who opposed the death penalty but advocated the device as a more humane method of killing.
You do not have to be a radical anti-statist to believe that governments that struggle to manage procurement and cost control cannot be trusted with the right to kill their own citizens.
We should be grateful, in the United Kingdom, for the wisdom of our parliamentary representatives who “suspended” the death penalty in 1965. Since then, a majority of the British people has continued to tell opinion pollsters that capital punishment should be brought back – at least for some categories of murder – but there has been no real push to do so.
The issue in this country was, in effect, closed by Margaret Thatcher, who said that she personally supported the death penalty but did not seek to do anything about it.
None of this is to take away from the grief and misery of the family of Pike’s victim, Colleen Slemmer, who was killed when she was just 19. But most of the rest of the world has found that this grief and misery is no deeper if the death penalty is not available as a punishment.
Most of the rest of the world, indeed, has been moving away from state-sponsored murder for decades. The United States, under the baleful influence of Donald Trump, is the exception. It too was moving away from this cruel and unusual punishment until he was elected in 2016. After a long decline, the number of executions started to rise again, then fell under Joe Biden, and now they have risen again.
President Trump is directly responsible only for the few federal cases – although there were a record number of federal executions in his first term – but his supporters in the 27 states that still have the death penalty have pushed the numbers up across America, including in Tennessee, where Pike’s name has not yet been added to the statistics.
Bill Lee, the Trumpite governor of Tennessee, has ordered a “comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred” in Pike’s case. Let us hope that at least some American supporters of the death penalty can see, without the need for a review, that what occurred is an inevitable consequence of an inhumane system.
If anything good can come out of this botched execution, it might be some strengthening of the emotional case against the death penalty.
