In 1995, Christa Pike confessed to murdering and torturing her classmate Colleen Slemmer. According to law enforcement authorities, the 18-year-old Pike and two teenage friends in Knoxville, Tennessee, lured Slemmer into a wooded area, where one of them carved a pentagram into her chest. Her head was smashed with a chunk of asphalt. Detectives later discovered a piece of Slemmer’s skull in Pike’s coat pocket.
Pike doesn’t deserve a shred of sympathy, in other words. But that doesn’t make her bungled execution this week any less repulsive. An enduring mystery is why so many conservatives, who tend to distrust the government, still support the death penalty even though incidents like this keep happening.
Pike was supposed to die Wednesday evening after Tennessee officials administered a lethal dose of pentobarbital, a drug widely used to put dogs down. Instead, Pike described a burning sensation in her arm making it feel like it was “about to burst open,” according to observers. That indicated the injection probably failed to enter her bloodstream and instead seeped into the surrounding tissue. As of Friday, Pike’s lawyer said she remained in critical condition.
Pike’s attorneys had warned officials that she had a blood disorder and small veins likely to make carrying out a lethal injection difficult. They even suggested hanging as an alternative method of execution. State officials and multiple courts ignored them.
This marks the second lethal injection Tennessee has fumbled this year. In May, the attempted execution of Tony Carruthers left him “wincing and groaning,” according to observers, as a physician struggled to find a vein. That doctor confirmed in a later deposition that he hadn’t placed a central line in more than a decade and had no current hospital privileges.
Another grim aspect of the shameful capital-punishment business: States are often unable to obtain pentobarbital directly from manufacturers, who have refused to supply it for lethal injections, so officials instead turn to the less regulated corners of the drug world, such as compounding pharmacies. The sources are undisclosed, so there’s no way of knowing whether degraded chemicals that might cause unnecessary harm are being used.
Trust us, officials seem to be saying. But why should they be trusted? The Death Penalty Information Center has recorded 75 instances from 1890 to 2010 in which lethal injections went awry — more than 7 percent of all such executions.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee), who is running for governor, used this week’s debacle to proclaim, “Bring back the electric chair” and deliver justice “swiftly.” Perhaps she is unaware of the long list of gruesomely botched electrocutions, including multiple incidents of people bursting into flames. That’s why states abandoned the practice.
Another reason to distrust government-as-executioner: The Death Penalty Information Center reports that, since 1973, at least 200 people sentenced to death have been exonerated.
Even in cases where a criminal’s guilt is without doubt, the government’s abysmal execution record should make one hesitate. Criminal justice is not something that simply happens to bad people in a vacuum; it implicates all of society, which is why many criminal cases are brought against defendants by the public: e.g., the State of Tennessee v. Christa Gail Pike.
Some members of the public are more directly affected: Jurors, who are called on to render judgment but are powerless to ensure their verdicts are carried out competently, and those who witness botched executions, including not only correctional officers and other observers, but also family members of the victims. These relatives might crave justice, but brutality does not heal.
Even if the death penalty could be guaranteed to apply only to the guilty and to do so efficiently, this practice should be opposed on moral grounds. In fact, the United States stands virtually alone among developed nations in killing its own citizens.
Unfortunately, more than half the country still supports the practice. But eventually, one must hope, Americans will start to wonder how the barbaric policy could endure in the U.S. well into the 21st century. Perhaps some doubts, even among conservatives, will be sown by the ghastly government-sponsored attempt to kill Christa Pike.
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