In 1995, when she was 18, the now 50-year-old Christa Pike and her boyfriend tortured and murdered her classmate, Colleen Slemmer. At the age of 20, she was sentenced to death. After decades of litigation and appeals, as is typical with death row cases, her lethal injection was finally scheduled for September 30th.
In the second botched execution in Tennessee this year, Pike received two doses of pentobarbital but did not immediately die. Instead, the drug left her in critical condition with her arms blistered and she is now at a hospital receiving life-saving care. Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has halted executions pending the results of a review.
The botched execution of Christa Pike has shone another spotlight on our immoral and inhumane death penalty and provides more evidence that our ability to ethically implement capital punishment is inadequate enough that it should be nationally abolished.
It’s true that some people deserve to die and that we may be morally justified as a society to impose the sentence of death onto those who are responsible for repugnant crimes. It’s not too difficult to see how the horrific nature of Pike’s crime and justice for Colleen Slemmer’s family required that Pike be put to death.
It’s unclear what exactly went wrong with the execution or whether she will recover, but it is disturbing that all of this medical care is being dedicated for someone that the state attempted to kill, only for her to be executed at a later date. Sometimes it seems like nothing is more fragile than human life and yet we are still unable to humanely and reliably end a prisoner’s life.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, over 3% of executions go wrong in some way. Some electrocutions have taken a disturbing amount of time, sometimes lighting the inmate on fire and leaving their body charred before death. During lethal injections or asphyxiations, some inmates have been left writhing in pain and violently thrashing for extended periods of time.
Executions by firing squads seem to be more reliable but the practice has been banned by most jurisdictions for being seen as barbaric – some firing squad executions have also led to prolonged and painful deaths.
Even if we were certain about the guilt of the accused, executions are too often inhumane. But the state of capital punishment is worse than that because we cannot always be certain that those who we condemn to death are truly guilty.
Since 1973, over 200 people on death row have been exonerated – for every 8 executions, one person has been exonerated, which means that our justice system sentences innocent people to death at an astonishing rate.
As much as we may want to think that these exonerations prove that our system is adequately set up to catch wrongful convictions, it’s difficult to know how many have fallen through the cracks and advocacy organizations have documented many instances where there was strong evidence of innocence regarding executed inmates.
That fact is that we do execute innocent people. But what is killing the guilty worth to us compared to avoiding killing the innocent?
We can do this moral math for ourselves. If death is sometimes an appropriate punishment, whatever extra moral goodness we create by executing some guilty person over imprisoning them for life is far smaller than the incredible moral tragedy of executing a completely innocent person. If we want to be a good and just society, the moral math is clearly not in favor of capital punishment.
As much as we may empathize with the families of victims for their tragic losses, thinking rationally about it, capital punishment makes us a less ethical society. Rather than thinking of this as sanctimonious advocacy on behalf of killers and rapists, we should consider how it must feel to be an innocent person, your whole life ruined, trapped in torturous solitary confinement for decades, and finally strapped to a gurney to face death. If you’re even more unlucky, instead of a dignified and peaceful end, our execution method might torture you for a while.
That’s an awful tragedy inflicted by our society that we can avoid entirely by simply setting the maximum penalty to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Failed executions like that of Christa Pike only provide additional evidence that the death penalty is broken and immoral.
Rafael Perez is a columnist for the Southern California News Group