Tennessee’s botched execution of Christa Pike raises tough questions

Editor’s note: This commentary includes descriptions of botched executions.

Tennessee’s botched execution of convicted murderer Christa Pike has left behind some lingering and disturbing questions. 

As for Pike, she was hospitalized with serious injuries, now is in a prison rehabilitation center and as she heals, the state has not indicated if Tennessee will take another shot at killing her. Gov. Bill Lee faces awkward questions about former Correction Commissioner Frank Strada. Yes, Lee has dumped him, but why was he hired in the first place? CNN is among the outlets that has documented that he “reportedly had a history of overseeing execution missteps in two states.”

Veteran journalist John North of WBIR in Knoxville was a witness to Tennessee’s attempt to kill Pike. He detailed the irregularities that erupted, Pike’s snoring sounds, the frequent closing of blinds so the witnesses could not see certain things. “Prison officials led us into a staff room to give us a few minutes to gather our thoughts,” he wrote. “We needed it. We all looked at our notes. We came to the same conclusion — this hadn’t gone according to plan, and she was still alive.”       

Botched U.S. executions are not as rare as one might think. One researcher tallied the 8,776 executions between 1890 and 2010. In 276 of them (3.15%) something went wrong.

Attorney Louis Nizer years ago wrote The Implosion Conspiracy about the espionage trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Both were executed by electrocution on June 19, 1953. The death of Ethel was particularly gruesome. Nizer wrote, “There was a strong smell of burning flesh as her body reached 140 degrees. Thin smoke rose from her scalp and turned blue in the overhead light, as it flattened out in an ugly cake against the skylight overhead.”

One doctor stepped forward and listened to her heart, saying in a hollow voice “This woman is still alive.” After some whispered conversations, she was strapped in again for two more jolts of 57 seconds each. The second jolt “made sputtering noises and sent a plume of smoke out of her head. Then silence and collapse.” The doctor applied his stethoscope to the smoldering chest and pronounced her dead.

A survived execution in Tennessee exposes the grim science of lethal injection

The newspaper columnist Russell Baker once wrote about his experience in the early 1950s as a reporter called upon to witness a hanging. “The hangman, of course, was an amateur,” declared Baker. “Even at the rate Maryland was then working its gallows, it was hard to get enough practice to do the job professionally. Consequently, a certain percentage of his ministrants failed to receive professional neck fractures when they dropped. These failed works hung there — before the mantlepiece, as it were — gurgling and choking for 15 or 20 minutes. On occasion, prison guards might seize them by the knees and pull down forcefully to speed the evening along.” These events routinely left observers shocked and sickened.

Future Texas Gov. Ann Richards survived a three-way 1990 Democratic Party primary in which all three candidates vied to be the most pro-death-penalty. Bill Clinton when he was governor of Arkansas and running for president let an execution go forward of a man with seriously degraded mental capacity, all so Clinton could burnish his “tough on crime” credentials. Lee has responded to the botched execution of Christa Pike by delaying the one execution left during his term, but he has not wavered in his overall support for the death penalty.

Politicians of all stripes across the South routinely support death sentences, knowing that people overwhelmingly support executions, at least in the abstract. Executions, of course, do not happen in the abstract. They occur in prison chambers with the sounds of Christa Pike snoring as she survived a megadose of the same chemical we use to put down animals.

Tennessee politicians are unmoved to reconsider the moral dimension of executions, and seem to restrict their analysis to tinkering with the methods used. Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson, a Franklin Republican and candidate for Senate Speaker, suggested the electric chair or firing squads as alternatives.

Republican gubernatorial nominee, U.S. Sen.Marsha Blackburn, has said she favors reinstating the electric chair. House Speaker Cameron Sexton, a Crossville Republican, is open to several alternatives including the electric chair, firing squad or hanging, which Tennessee used as its primary method of execution until 1913. Johnson and Sexton both insist Tennessee’s Republican supermajority has no intention of moving away from capital punishment.

If we ever are to restrict or rescind the death penalty, it will be a case of the people getting ahead of the politicians. For that to happen, we never can forget the horrors guilty murderers have inflicted on innocent people and their surviving family members. We also must ask ourselves: Do we want the state to commit vengeful horrors in our name? Should we join the 113 countries and 23 states that have abandoned the death penalty? How long can the Supreme Court maintain the pretense that executions are not the cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by the Eighth Amendment?

We must allow ourselves to consider the notion that we need to curtail, if not eliminate, death penalty executions.