Reading about the tragic case of Christa Pike, and the botched attempt at execution by the state of Tennessee in the US is like undertaking a journey into a chamber of horrors. Pike, who was to be executed on September 30, had been found guilty of the brutal murder of a friend in 1995, when she was 18 years old.

In the US, some states retain the death penalty in their law books while others have abolished it, both positions being justified by reference to the Eight Amendment to the US Constitution.

Pike has been on death row for 32 years. mostly in solitary confinement. The attempted execution by the state on September 30 by a pentobarbital injection failed, even though the requisite dose was used twice.

She was then moved unconscious to a hospital where paradoxically the ICU staff did the opposite of what the jail staff had attempted to do. They made every attempt to rid her body of pentobarbital and bring her back to life.

After a few days she regained consciousness and after ten days was discharged to be sent back to prison, awaiting a decision of whether the state should attempt to execute her again. If Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird was the measure of America’s humanism and its aspiration for a decent society, then Christa Pike’s bungled execution is its dénouement.

The jail authorities still went ahead with trying to execute her with the lethal injection pentobarbital after having reviewed the extended discussions in legal circles around the Eight Amendment to the US Constitution, which sanctions the death penalty while placing the condition that “cruel and unusual punishments” not be “inflicted”.

The authorities also read the observation by the anesthetist Dr Joel Zivot, who had been advising Pike’s defence team on the risks of pentobarbital because she had very thin veins. The whole episode is so surreal that, to make sense of it and to arrive at a position of judgment, one has to turn to a moral philosopher for help.

No one who is concerned with building a just society can afford to ignore Christa Pike – not even if they live in another country.

#UnitedStates: The case of Christa Pike lays bare multiple reasons why the death penalty should........

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