By Tommy Acosta
The botched execution of convicted murderer Christa Pike presents us with a strange legal, moral and philosophical question about the death penalty.
What happens when the state executes you — and you don’t die?
Pike was sentenced to death for the brutal 1995 torture and murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. On Sept. 30, Tennessee attempted to carry out that sentence by lethal injection.
It didn’t work.
According to Pike’s attorneys, she was given two doses of pentobarbital. She survived both and was eventually transported to a hospital, where she has remained unconscious, critically ill and on a ventilator.
Suppose Pike eventually succumbs to the poison that was put into her body during the execution and dies tomorrow, next week or a month from now. Was she executed? I would think the answer would have to be yes.
The state intentionally administered lethal drugs for the specific purpose of killing her. If those drugs ultimately cause her death, the fact that they took days rather than minutes to accomplish the job shouldn’t magically transform an execution into something else.
The execution would simply have taken quite longer than Tennessee planned.
But suppose Pike survives. Then what?
Does Tennessee strap her down again, find another vein and say, essentially, “Sorry about the first one, Christa. Let’s try this again”?
Legally, apparently, the question isn’t settled simply because the first attempt failed. But morally and constitutionally, another execution attempt would open an extraordinary argument over whether the state can subject a person to the ordeal of execution twice.
And that’s where this gets uncomfortable. Some people will say Pike suffered terribly during the execution attempt.
There is evidence she did. Her attorneys say both arms were swollen, burned and blistered afterward, and witnesses described obvious distress during the procedure.
Others will respond: What about Colleen Slemmer? She suffered, too. Horribly. And unlike Pike, she didn’t have doctors waiting nearby to save her life.
That inevitably raises the ancient question of retribution. Is Pike’s suffering some form of poetic justice for the suffering she inflicted upon another human being?
Or does civilized justice require us to say something harder: What Pike did to her victim and what the state is permitted to do to Pike are two entirely different moral questions?
That’s the part people sometimes miss in debates about capital punishment.
The Constitution doesn’t say cruel punishment becomes acceptable when the condemned person committed an especially cruel crime. If anything, that’s when our principles are actually tested.
Now let’s make the hypothetical even stranger.
Suppose Pike remains hospitalized and at some point her heart stops. No pulse. No heartbeat.
Doctors immediately begin resuscitation and, several minutes they give up trying. They declare her dead. Ten minutes later she wakes up fully conscious and yawning. Did Tennessee finally execute her? Did she complete her sentence and earned herself a ticket out the hospital door.
Can she now say, “Well, boys, you sentenced me to death. I died. Sentence served. Where are my clothes?”
But philosophically, the hypothetical exposes something fascinating.
What exactly is a death sentence? Is the punishment the process of being executed? Is it experiencing the expectation of death? Is it receiving the lethal chemicals?
Or is the sentence fulfilled only by one irreversible biological event: Death.
Because Tennessee has certainly punished Pike.
It prepared her for death. It put her into the execution chamber. It inserted the needles. It administered the drugs intended to kill her.
And according to witnesses and her attorneys, she suffered through an execution procedure that went terribly wrong.
Yet she’s alive. So apparently the sentence isn’t “execution.”
The sentence is death.
And there is a difference.
That difference becomes even more disturbing when we consider what happens next.
Suppose Pike never regains consciousness.
Suppose she remains dependent upon a ventilator and intensive medical care for months or even years.
The state that tried to kill her now has an obligation to keep her alive.
Think about this for a moment.
One arm of the government deliberately injects chemicals into a human being for the purpose of stopping her heart.
When that doesn’t work, another group of people races her to a hospital and uses medicine, machines and enormous amounts of money to prevent her from dying.
First the state says, “You must die.”
Then, hours later, it says, “For God’s sake, don’t let her die.”
There is something almost Kafkaesque about it.
And Tennessee cannot simply solve the problem by withholding food, water or necessary medical treatment until Pike dies. That would raise an entirely different set of constitutional, medical and ethical questions and would not magically convert neglect into a lawful execution.
The state chose execution.
The execution failed.
That failure belongs to the state, not the prisoner.
And this is where the people who actually carried out the procedure deserve scrutiny.
Pike’s attorneys had warned before the execution about medical complications, including problems establishing intravenous access. Yet Tennessee proceeded.
Then the extraordinary happened.
Two doses of the drug intended to kill her failed to do so.
Tennessee’s own execution protocol apparently didn’t provide another step after that.
No Plan C.
No “In case inmate remains inconveniently alive, turn to page 47.”
The execution was over.
Except the condemned woman wasn’t dead.
Gov. Bill Lee has since halted Tennessee’s remaining executions for the year and ordered a review of what happened.
Because whether you support the death penalty or oppose it, surely everyone should be able to agree on one thing:
If the government assumes the enormous power to deliberately take a human life in the name of its citizens, it had better know what it is doing.
There is also another uncomfortable question.
At what point does punishment become vengeance?
Christa Pike committed a horrific murder. Nothing about this column changes that, minimizes it or restores the life of Colleen Slemmer.
But the purpose of a justice system isn’t to imitate the murderer.
It is supposed to represent something better.
More deliberate. More rational. More controlled.
Justice is supposed to be what remains after anger has cooled.
And now Pike lies unconscious in a hospital while Tennessee, her attorneys, doctors and perhaps eventually the courts confront a question nobody expected to be asking:
Has this woman already been punished enough to satisfy a sentence of death?
Legally, the answer may ultimately be no.
Morally, the answer isn’t nearly so simple.
If she dies from the drugs Tennessee injected into her, then the state will have accomplished what it set out to do, albeit in a horrifyingly prolonged fashion.
If she survives, Tennessee faces a much more profound decision.
It can insist that death means death and try again.
Or it can recognize that there are moments when the machinery of government fails so catastrophically that simply pulling the lever a second time ceases to look like justice.
Maybe that’s the real lesson buried inside this gruesome episode.
We use the phrase “death penalty” so casually that the words become almost bureaucratic.
Death penalty. Capital punishment. Execution.
Nice clean terminology.
But there is nothing bureaucratic about deliberately stopping another human being’s heart.
And when the heart stubbornly refuses to stop, all those clean words suddenly disappear.
What remains is a living human being on a hospital bed, a dead young woman who can never be brought back, a government trying to explain what went wrong and the rest of us confronting a question that has followed civilization for thousands of years:
When we kill in the name of justice, what exactly makes it justice?