Christa Pike’s botched execution is a reminder of the horror of the death penalty

‘We should be angry, too. In our name, a woman was tortured.’ Photograph: Dipti Vaidya/IMAGN IMAGES/Reuters ConnectView image in fullscreen‘We should be angry, too. In our name, a woman was tortured.’ Photograph: Dipti Vaidya/IMAGN IMAGES/Reuters ConnectChrista Pike’s botched execution is a reminder of the horror of the death penaltyMoira DoneganLethal injection was a way for us to deny the reality of capital punishment. Pike’s experience shows us what it is

Christa Pike had asked to be hanged. In the weeks before her botched execution by lethal injection on 30 September, in which she survived two lethal doses of barbiturate pentobarbital and had to be hospitalized, Pike and her legal team had challenged Tennessee’s execution protocol.

The state’s lethal injection regimen had failed before. In May, Tony Carruthers was also sent to Tennessee’s death chamber, only to leave alive after prison officials struggled to find a vein.

In Pike’s case, her lawyers argued, the lethal injection protocol was likely to fail again.

She also had vein issues, they said; if she was subjected to an ordeal like Carruthers’, in which prison officials punctured their prone prisoner more than a dozen times over the course of an hour in an attempt to administer the drug, Pike’s history of trauma, which is lengthy and acute, would serve to make the experience unconstitutionally torturous.

Pentobarbital, the drug that was set to be used to kill Pike, also risked a needlessly painful death.

“The drug supposedly burns very bad,” Pike said in a taped interview just weeks before her scheduled execution. “And so that sounds scary to me because they used the word Draino in speaking about this drug, and the thought of suffocating and drowning on my own bodily fluid and blood isn’t very appealing to me.”

It was to avoid this ordeal that Pike requested to be hanged by the neck until dead instead. Her request was denied. From the execution chamber during Tennessee’s failed attempt to kill her, witnesses said that they could hear Pike complaining about a burning pain in her arm, which felt, she said, like it was about to burst.

After nearly a week of being unconscious and intubated at a Nashville hospital after her failed execution attempt, Pike is now awake and talking. Her arms are severely injured from her execution attempt and not fully usable, but she’s still shackled to her hospital bed anyway. She still remains “foggy” from the effects of the state-administered overdose, and it’s unclear whether she will recover full cognitive function as doctors assess the state of her brain damage.

But she remembers the moments when Tennessee tried and failed to kill her. She is reportedly very angry.

We should be angry, too. In our name, a woman was tortured.

In many death penalty cases, there are real questions about the factuality of a condemned person’s guilt or the fairness of their trial and appeals process.

That is less true in Pike’s case: there is no factual doubt that in 1995, when she was 18, Pike, now 50, lured her 19-year-old classmate Colleen Slemmer into a wooded area, and with an accomplice, Pike’s 17-year-old boyfriend, tortured her for about half an hour before finally killing her by smashing her skull in with a piece of concrete. Slemmer’s mother has been a particularly vocal advocate for Pike’s execution, and is reportedly furious that her daughter’s killer has survived.

The wishes of victims and their families should be crucial to what our understanding of justice means. No one knows better the meaning and significance of violence than the people who it is inflicted on.

But it is also true that Pike’s criminal trial did not take into account factors in her life that might have explanatory, if not mitigating, power – such as the reality that she committed murder at the end of a childhood that had been marked by horrific, repeated, and severe sexual and physical violence.

And it is true, too, that when we assess what justice looks like, we must ask not only what would be most meaningful and satisfying for victims but also what best reflects our values and meets our obligations as a state. By that metric, the death penalty has always failed. It does not mete out justice so much as lower the collective community to the level of its worst perpetrators.

Lethal injection used to be a way for us to deny this. The protocol was developed in the US and first adopted for executions in the late 1970s. It was meant to replace older methods of state killing, such as gas chambers, electric chairs and firing squads, offering what was positioned as a more dignified and civilized, and supposedly less painful, way of murdering a human being.

What lethal injection did instead was medicalize the death penalty’s brutality, allowing its proponents a kind of polite denial of what the punishment actually is.

Pike shows us what it really is. It is violent, brutal and cruel. It is painful, no matter how much medical science is used to deny or obscure this; it is superfluous and contrary to the needs of justice, and it degrades those who engage in it.

For a long time, I thought of the death penalty as dangerously final, opening up the possibility of innocent people irretrievably lost, of mistakes that can’t be taken back. And it is true that this happens: America has executed innocent people.

But Pike’s experience shows us that this is not the end of execution’s horror. There is something worse.

Tennessee has issued a temporary moratorium on executions, and the governor has called for a review of what went wrong in Pike’s execution. But he should know what went wrong: the problems with the lethal injection protocol, as well as with the death penalty more broadly, were not mysteries even before the state of Tennessee failed to kill Pike.

It is still possible that Pike will have to fight not to be sent back to the execution chamber again. And this is another harm of the death penalty: the repetitiveness of its injustice, the way it keeps us from learning from our mistakes.

Rarely do we get a second chance to do right by someone like Pike. The state of Tennessee should not get a second chance to try to kill her.