Am I Lying to Myself About the Death Penalty?

I am supposed to be against the death penalty.

Intellectually, I still think I’m against the death penalty. If asked, that’s probably how I’d describe myself. Practically, though, I’m just not sure that this remains true. In recent years, the gap between what I think about the death penalty and how I behave when the death penalty is at stake has grown so dramatically that I have come to wonder if I’m just lying to myself out of a desire to feel virtuous or open-minded. I don’t know if this is the result of my having kids, getting older, or moving to the South, but whatever it is, my job is to tell people honestly what I think about political issues, and what I honestly think about the death penalty in 2026 is that I am profoundly annoyed by the people who are against it.

Last night’s botched execution of Christa Pike has caused many Americans to call for an end to the practice. I have had the opposite reaction. The truth is that I think that Pike should be dead, and I am not at all upset that Tennessee tried to kill her. I wish it had succeeded, and I feel no qualms about this. I have read what she was convicted of — what she confessed to — which was this:

Later that night, Pike went to Iloilo’s room and told Iloilo that she had just killed Slemmer and that she had brought back a piece of the victim’s skull as a souvenir. Pike showed Iloilo the piece of skull and told her that she had cut the victim’s throat six times, beaten her, and thrown asphalt at the victim’s head. Pike told Iloilo that the victim had begged “them” to stop cutting and beating her, but Pike did not stop because the victim continued to talk. Pike told Iloilo that she had thrown a large piece of asphalt at the victim’s head, and when it broke into smaller pieces, she had thrown those at the victim as well. Pike told Iloilo that a meat cleaver had been used to cut the victim’s back and a box cutter had been used to cut her throat. Finally, Pike said that a pentagram had been carved onto the victim’s forehead and chest. Iloilo said that Pike was dancing in a circle, smiling, and singing “la, la, la” while she related these details about the murder. When Iloilo saw Pike at breakfast the next morning she asked Pike what she had done with the piece of the victim’s skull. Pike replied that it was in her pocket and then said, “And, yes, I’m eating breakfast with it.”

. . . and, frankly, I cannot summon any other strong feelings than that she does not deserve to live. Per court records, her victim was so badly mutilated that her face could not be identified as a face:

On the day after the murder, January 13, at approximately 8:05 a.m., an employee of the University of Tennessee Grounds Department discovered Slemmer’s semi-nude, slashed, and badly beaten body near the greenhouses on the agricultural campus. He testified that the body was so badly beaten that he had first mistaken it for the corpse of an animal. Upon closer inspection, he saw the victim’s clothes and her nude breast and realized it was the body of a human female.

I am supposed to elevate my commitment to abstractions over my desire to legitimately punish that desecration of a human body. I no longer think I can. This is not a question of due process or presumption of innocence or reasonable doubt, or of any of the other liberal principles that I hold dear. This is a question of sentencing. I often jokingly refer to myself as a “criminal justice squish,” which I am. But what I mean by that is that I am very much a defense-lawyer type of guy when it comes to the mechanisms by which we try the accused. In all criminal contexts, I want to see a fair trial that respects the edicts of the Constitution and that privileges the defendant in all the ways that the Constitution demands. But once that’s been done? Sentence away, to the full extent of the law. It does not follow that someone who is liberal on criminal procedure must be liberal in sentencing, too. I used to feel alarmed if I heard that someone had been sentenced to death. In cases where there is no doubt about their guilt, I no longer do. On the contrary: More often than not, when I hear about a death penalty case in the news, I look up the details of the crime that precipitated that sentence and think, “Yeah, that sounds about right.” If I’m annoyed at all, it is by the people who are supposed to be on “my side.”

Why? Well, because, as an activist class, the anti-death-penalty brigade strikes me as being dishonest, unlikable, and chronically incapable of prioritizing (or even acknowledging) the innocent. Please note that I am not talking here about the average citizen-opponent of the death penalty — almost all of whom are decent and earnest — but about the professional political movement that exists to try to prevent every execution. Over the past half century, these people have convinced the Supreme Court to rule that the Constitution says things about the death penalty that it absolutely does not (bluntly put, there is no originalist case whatsoever that limits the death penalty to premeditated murders — that is entirely made up); they have invariably gone further than their brief demands (opposing the death penalty does not require one to feel sorry for serial killers, or to elevate them to victim status); they have cheated when making their case about the method (it is just too rich to see the people who have got execution methods limited to lethal injection and then reduced the availability and efficiency of those drugs claim that the practical problems they have provoked represent an argument for their position); and they have caviled relentlessly about how long the process takes when the process takes as long as it does in large part because they have seen fit to extend it. Along the way, they have put me off their cause.

This, in part, is because I don’t trust them with the next step. I have noticed that the societies that abolish the death penalty are the same ones that are weak on crime in general. The European Union is institutionally opposed to the death penalty, and its members believe themselves to be morally superior to the United States because of this. But it is a serious problem that this opposition has not been offset by the imposition of the draconian prison sentences that are necessary if death is to be removed as an option. Portugal has a maximum prison sentence of 25 years, with no exceptions. Norway gave Anders Breivik — who murdered 77 people and said he wished he’d killed more! — just 21 years in prison. Germany, which on paper has a more sensible system, frequently undermines it by letting murderers out early (in 2024, the median time served for “life imprisonment” in Germany was 17.4 years). It is true that, in some European countries, the government is permitted to extend the prison term of a convict if that convict is deemed to present an ongoing threat. But that is not quite the same thing as handing down a permanent sentence for a heinous crime. I understand that people differ on this matter, but in my view, if we are not going to execute people who commit crimes that would be worthy of execution, then we need to lock them up with no caveats and no opportunity for parole. Unfortunately, most of the anti-death-penalty activists I have met seem to be against this. That concerns me.

As for Christa Pike? Well, it is a scandal that her execution was botched, but we must ask whose fault we imagine that was. One of the criticisms that I have often offered about the death penalty in America is that it is “euphemistic” — which is to say that, by medicalizing the process, we have obscured what the state is actually doing. I used to think that this was a knock on the pro-death-penalty position. Over time, however, I have come to wonder if I’ve had that backward. After all, it’s not the pro crowd who have demanded all this fuss; it’s the anti crowd. Every pro-death-penalty voter I know would happily replace lethal injections with a firing squad or a gallows; every anti-death-penalty activist opposes that. Tennessee has the death penalty, which means that the debate there is not over whether to kill but how. Is it really fair to blame those who didn’t insist on lethal injections for the problems that attend lethal injections? I am not so sure.

Which is all to say that, on this question at least, I have drifted helplessly into an endless battle with myself, and that I now occupy the muddled middle ground that I usually so disdain. I can rehearse both sides of the argument. I can respect normal people who take either view. Were I asked to settle the dispute, I do not know how I would vote. But I do know this: Fifteen years ago, I would have felt obliged to wrestle with this matter for the benefit of the condemned. Now, I do it solely for myself.