Lethal injection presents the death penalty as something clinical and orderly. Yet the aim remains the same: to终 kill someone.
Christa Pike, the Tennessee woman convicted of killing Colleen Slemmer in 1995, stood as a condemned inmate on Wednesday.
Whether and when she will walk free again remains up in the air. But, as of Thursday evening, she remained alive after the state’s attempt to execute her by lethal injection. Twice.
In other words, it did not unfold as intended. Correctional staff administered a (purportedly) lethal dose of pentobarbital, a barbiturate, around 7:30 p.m. “My arm feels like it’s about to burst open,” Pike told a reporter present to witness the proceeding. Pike convulsed and did not die. Consequently, staff drew the death-chamber curtain and gave another dose, after which she begin loudly snoring and struggled for air. Pike was afterward transferred to a hospital, where she was intubated and placed on a ventilator as medical personnel worked “to save [her] life,” her attorneys wrote in a court filing yesterday.
That the state would attempt to rescue Pike moments after trying to end her life illustrates how the government’s overarching approach to capital punishment can appear logically inconsistent. In other words, it makes little sense, as officials have sought to sanitize something that—regardless of one’s stance in the debate—cannot be made humane.
Lethal injection was first authorized by Oklahoma in 1977 and first used in Texas in 1982. Its adoption was part of a troubled lineage aimed at making the act of killing people more humane. Before a terminal cocktail of drugs, the methods included the electric chair, the gas chamber, the gallows, and the firing squad.
Reasons to be wary of the electric chair are understandable. The device debuted in the late 19th century after New York Gov. David Hill, who argued that hanging had “come down to us from the dark ages,” commissioned a study to examine “the most humane and practical method of carrying into effect the sentence of death.” The conclusion: execution by electricity.
Hindsight would have been helpful. It can take several minutes to stop the heart. In practice, the electric chair has come to symbolize torture, for both the person facing execution and the witnesses who observe.
Shifting to lethal injection lessened much of that spectacle—it does resemble a medical procedure, something that might seem routine were it not for the setting and the final words spoken. Yet in the ongoing effort to render executions humane, the government chose a method that can still inflict intense pain on the individual, as Pike’s case demonstrates. A single dose can cost taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars. And it holds the troubling distinction of the highest rate of botched executions.
There’s no contest. From 1890 to 2010, the United States carried out 8,776 executions, according to data from the Death Penalty Information Center. The overall botched-execution rate across all methods was 3.15 percent. Lethal injections accounted for more than twice that figure: 7.2 percent. Gas executions followed at 5.4 percent, then hanging at 3.12 percent, and electrocution at 1.92 percent.
Only one method maintains a seemingly perfect record—firing squad. Ironically, it is also the least-used option, having been employed a mere 34 times over that 120-year span.
The obvious reason exposes the heart of this dilemma. Firing squads, perhaps more than any other method, lay bare the brutality of the death penalty. You align a person against a wall and fire at the heart. Unlike the electric chair, the act is swift, potentially reducing the condemned’s suffering even as the spectacle unsettles those who witness it. Lethal injection cloaks the process in something different: clinical, gentle, civilized. But the objective remains identical: to terminate a life.
This debate, for more than a century, has centered on how to do so humanely. It arguably does not exist in any true sense. Lethal means of taking a life are, by definition, at odds with the concept of humanity—regardless of whether you’re an abolitionist or someone who views the ultimate punishment as a moral necessity for heinous crimes. Pike received the humane option. In her case, it may end with “skin necrosis, permanent scarring, functional impairment, compartment syndrome, [and] chronic neuropathic pain” before the state possibly returns to carry out the sentence again. One might wonder how that could be considered less barbaric.
