What the Modern State Gets Wrong About Execution

W hen the state kills, how it does so should not look like an outpatient procedure. Therein lies an irony: The more the state attempts to medicalize killing, the more it risks unsuccessful and inefficient executions, and the more it obscures the full weight of what retributive wrath is meant to accomplish and signify.

We are seeing this in real time this week in Tennessee with the botched execution of Christa Pike. The particulars of the attempted execution of Pike are grisly. News reports indicate that the method of execution — lethal injection — left her breathing after two doses of pentobarbital. This was Tennessee’s second execution failure within the last five months. Pike was rushed to the hospital, where her condition remains critical. Soon after the failed execution, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee announced that Tennessee would put a halt to further executions in 2026 until a third party could review the execution procedures.

Before we proceed any further in talking about the inadequacies of clinical execution methods, we must stop and put the focus on why capital punishment was sought in the first place: The criminal in question was convicted of the first-degree murder in 1995 of Colleen Slemmer. Slemmer is the real victim here, not Pike, regardless of how the latter’s botched execution will be framed. Even a successful execution of Pike cannot restore what ultimate justice longs for — the life of Colleen Slemmer.

I write as a professor of Christian ethics and as a “retentionist” — meaning that I believe the death penalty is just and called for by the demands of political justice. Capital punishment has a storied place in Christian theology. See, for instance, Genesis 9:6: “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.” Also consider Romans 13:4: “For he [government] is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.” Western law has long relied upon the natural law foundations of Christianity to justify capital punishment.

In Christian theology, the logic of capital punishment is grounded in a reciprocal and retributive understanding of divine justice: So profound is the dignity and worth of a human being that the only fitting response to the wanton murder of a human being is the forfeiting of one’s own life. Far from capital punishment being a product of capricious bloodlust, it signifies the state’s action to safeguard the political community and restore — though imperfectly — justice for the family of the slain. Capital punishment cannot bring a loved one back. It can, though, bring temporal assuagement to a family grieving the lost life of a loved one.

No Christian theologian should suggest that capital punishment is not what it is: the lethal application of force to take the life of the guilty. Because the taking of human life should never be taken lightly or haphazardly, it should arouse a visceral response.

Yet it is the visceral nature of what capital punishment is that runs afoul of how the modern state practices it — by medicalizing it and sanitizing it. We use gurneys, IVs, and the technical vocabulary of modern medicine to portray it as a “procedure.” We invite medical doctors to certify death or find the necessary veins to administer the deadly elixir. We make a spectacle of the ordeal — highlighting last meals and final statements, accompanied by press conferences.

Sanitizing capital punishment erases the deterrence it is supposed to evoke. By medicalizing capital punishment, we try to protect the public conscience from what is really taking place. Capital punishment ought to be a public act of justice. But great effort undertaken to obscure what is happening shortchanges the moral point of capital punishment in the first place. If a society authorizes capital punishment in law, refusing to reckon with it should make us question why we practice it at all.

Capital punishment is an expression of public justice: It reminds the citizenry that offenders are morally responsible and that the slain are indeed victims of grave injustice.

All of this confirms the picture of Christian theology, which tells us that the state bears the sword, not a syringe. While no execution method is infallible, it is time for states that practice capital punishment to revisit the medicalization of killing.

I write very much in favor of the death penalty. In fact, I might even be a maximalist in terms of making it an eligible penalty for more crimes — especially crimes against children. But the overly clinical, medically sanitized nature of modern capital punishment is a mistake. It’s deceptively cruel because it attempts to mask what the state is justly doing: killing. Bring back what is efficient and works: hanging and firing squads. Make them public. Doubtlessly some will read that last sentence as an invitation to return to barbaric times. But former times drew on the wisdom of history that understood just how grave the crime of murder really is as a threat to the common good. Enlightened as we think we are compared with the people of formerly benighted times, previous eras practiced capital punishment with far more sobriety than we do now.

With the news of the botched execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee, we can expect a torrent of news stories and editorials on why moratoriums on a supposedly “outmoded” form of punishment must be halted. I suggest ignoring these calls and having legislatures implement time-tested execution procedures.

What happened in Tennessee is a tragedy in multiple directions. A criminal now sits ostensibly incapacitated because of incompetence. The tragedy of inefficiency permits convicted inmates to languish on death row for decades awaiting their medicalized end. Above all, it’s the tragedy of delayed justice for Slemmer’s family that should weigh on us most.