Tennessee's attempt to execute Christa Pike failed this morning, as officials administered two doses of pentobarbital that left her alive, unconscious but with a heartbeat, before she was taken to hospital to preserve the life the state had tried to end.
Pike, sentenced to death for the 1995 torture and murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, survived the botched procedure. Her lawyers said she was unconscious, still had a heartbeat and could be heard snoring, before being transported to hospital.
A Grim Spectacle in Tennessee
The episode highlights the obscenity at the heart of capital punishment: a government claims killing demonstrates the value of life, employs people to carry it out, watches the condemned person fail to die and then summons doctors to save them.
Supporters argue Pike deserved no mercy, pointing to Slemmer's suffering. Others contend some crimes are so monstrous that death is the only proportionate punishment. But America's justice system, like every justice system, makes mistakes.
Innocence and Error
Since 1973, 203 people sentenced to death have been exonerated, roughly one for every eight executions carried out during the modern era. A landmark academic study estimated that at least 4.1% of defendants sentenced to death were innocent.
US editor Christopher Bucktin visited death row and sat opposite Richard Glossip in Oklahoma, a man given nine execution dates and three final meals, who spent years knowing officials could arrive to kill him. The US Supreme Court eventually overturned his conviction after finding prosecutors had failed to correct false testimony from their crucial witness. He was released on bond this year while awaiting a new trial.
The Cost and the Victims
Death penalty cases require longer trials, specialist lawyers, additional hearings and years of appeals, precisely because the consequences of getting it wrong are permanent. Without those appeals, some innocent people already sentenced to die would never have walked free.
Executioners too carry regret about their role years afterwards, and the damage spreads far beyond the condemned prisoner, reaching guards, witnesses, relatives and those asked to operate this machinery of death.
A History of Reversal
Under Joe Biden, federal executions were halted after then Attorney General Merrick Garland imposed a moratorium in 2021, and Biden later commuted 37 of the 40 federal death sentences then in place to life without parole. Under Donald Trump, the direction has been reversed.
In 1989, as New York reeled from the Central Park jogger attack, Trump paid for full-page newspaper advertisements demanding: “Bring Back The Death Penalty. Bring Back Our Police.” The five Black and Latino teenagers convicted in that case were later exonerated after another man confessed and DNA evidence supported his account. Their convictions were vacated in 2002.
Britain has its own shameful history. Timothy Evans was hanged in 1950 and later received a posthumous pardon. Derek Bentley went to the gallows in 1953 before his murder conviction was quashed decades later.
Police make mistakes. Prosecutors make mistakes. Witnesses lie. Evidence is missed. Juries can convict the innocent and judges can preside over trials later found unsafe. A prison door can be opened and a conviction overturned, allowing a wrongly imprisoned person to step back into daylight. But once the state has killed an innocent person, there is no appeal worth hearing, no pardon capable of repairing the damage and no politician able to undo what has been done.
