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The Death Penalty Has Become a Torture Machine

Christa Pike’s botched lethal injection proves there is no humane form of execution.

On Wednesday, the state of Tennessee twice tried to kill Christa Pike, failed both times, and ended up grievously wounding her. Pike, a convicted murderer, was meant to be executed using a strong dose of the sedative pentobarbital. This was even after Pike’s lawyers and an outside doctor, Joel Zivot, warned that the lethal injection was a risky procedure; Zivot advised that Pike’s particular medical conditions could “lead to a painful and cruel death by lethal injection.”

Zivot was right to say that Pike would suffer. But the nature of that suffering was, if anything, even worse than he predicted. Pike was given one ostensibly lethal dose, but she continued to live. She was then given another dose and fell into a deep sleep, but still did not die. At that point, she was taken to a hospital, where she continues to be in critical condition, being fed by a tube and breathing through a ventilator. According to her lawyer, she has not spoken since the failed execution.

The entire grotesque spectacle highlights how perverse the death penalty has become in contemporary America. It is increasingly unpopular and indeed shunned by people of conscience. But, paradoxically, this means that when executions are conducted, they are conducted by incompetent and even sleazy officials who end up committing torture.

There are many reasons to oppose the death penalty. It is a form of violent retribution, rather than justice. It is irrevocable—when an innocent person is executed, no form of reparation can bring them back. Capital punishment is also often applied unfairly, much more likely to be used against racial minorities and the poor.

But the barbaric botched execution of Pike highlights another case against capital punishment that is gaining urgency: The attempt to make executions more humane by methods such as lethal injection—which was once sold as the clinical, painless alternative to the gallows or the electric chair—has utterly failed. In fact, it has made executions even more gruesome and cruel, underscoring the grim truth that killing a healthy body cannot be done with clean hands by the state.

Pike’s case has been troubling from the beginning. She was sentenced to death in 1996 for murdering a Jobs Corps classmate the previous year, when she was 18. (Her boyfriend, along with another friend, participated in the crime.) The courts refused to consider extenuating facts, such as Pike’s history of mental illness and the fact she had been repeatedly raped as a child.

Tennessee officials seem to have pushed forward her execution in part as an attempt to prevent a reopening of her case. As The New York Times reports:

Her lawyers said that a history of extreme trauma and sexual abuse that began when she was a toddler had not been considered at her trial. Just 90 minutes before Ms. Pike was set to die on Wednesday, a federal appeals court issued a stay, saying that it needed more time to consider new arguments in the case. For Tennessee, that set off a race against the clock. The........

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