Charlie’s right: Christa Pike, psycho murderess, should be dead. I’d be suspicious of any moral reasoning that reaches a different conclusion. But Christa Pike, Tennessee Department of Correction Inmate No. 261368, should not be done in by the state whose charge she is. Execution is a perversion of the citizen–state relationship.
The state’s chief purpose is to secure its constituents from internal and external threats. When one of its constituents is the threat, the state ought to use violence to secure the rest. Law enforcement officials are obliged to do so. And we have laws that protect non-officials from acting similarly. (With foreign threats, we can afford to be more openhanded.) Had a police officer come across 18-year-old Pike and her victim, Colleen Slemmer, in the woods near the University of Tennessee in Knoxville on January 12, 1995, that person ought to have ended Pike’s life. Tragically, that didn’t happen. Nor was Pike struck by a lumber hauler on her way to the woods, or surprised by a ruptured aortic aneurism during her sentencing, or shot down by a guard during her planned prison break in 2012 (which she didn’t get to attempt). These might have been a higher form of justice. What happened instead was that Pike was arrested, convicted, and interned at the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center.
I don’t object to Charlie’s moral judgment of this madwoman, or to his arguments against the fatuous anti-death-penalty activists and their noxious political ends. But I get queasy when I think of public servants such as the warden of the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, and publicly contracted physicians and nurses, euthanizing a detainee. Pike is no longer a threat, but she continues to be a citizen of the United States of America — to whose most elementary right, that to life, the state’s agents thereby continue to be morally bound. Her violation of that same right, for which her liberty has been rightfully, drastically curtailed, doesn’t relieve the state of its raison d’être. And administering double doses of pentobarbital to its own people is not what the state is for.