On the menu today: If you don’t like descriptions of grisly murders or dark humor about the death penalty, this may not be the edition of this newsletter for you. If you want the perspective of a professor of Christian ethics who has wrestled with the morality of the death penalty, remembering the victims of crime and the cause of justice, go read Andrew T. Walker. If you want an argument that even if murderers deserve to die for their crimes, the state isn’t the right one to carry out that action, go read Vahaken Mouradian.
But if you’ve ever wondered why our executioners apply an alcohol swab to prevent infection right before a lethal injection that is supposed to kill the death row inmate within minutes, this is the newsletter for you.
When the Government Is So Incompetent It Can’t Even Kill You Right
The New York Post, September 22:
In the event that she is not spared from execution, Christa Pike has made a special request. She wants an all-female execution squad to carry out the procedure in front of witnesses, including the family of her victim.
The reason, her lawyers say, is that she has post-traumatic stress disorder from the widely documented abuse she suffered at the hands of men as a young girl, including when she was just two years old.
Apparently, Pike got her request honored, with one exception; Dr. Mark Walton Fowler told NBC News he intended to participate. And then . . . apparently, everything went wrong:
Shortly before 9 p.m., emergency vehicles arrived as witnesses described what they saw and heard.
The execution was not successful. Pike received medical care following the failed execution attempt, according to a court filing. Her attorneys reported she was still breathing after receiving two doses of lethal pentobarbital.
As of the afternoon of Oct. 1, Pike’s location was not announced but attorneys said she was in critical condition.
Pike’s attorneys, from the Tennessee Office of the Post-Conviction Defender and Federal Defender Services of Eastern Tennessee, released a statement late Sept. 30: “Tonight the State of Tennessee once again failed to carry out a lawful execution. We take no pleasure in being right, but the concerns raised by Ms. Pike proved to be true: difficult vein access, blown veins, degraded pentobarbital, no emergency medical care available when things inevitably go wrong, all under a protocol that remains veiled in secrecy. Christa is being treated at a nearby hospital. We have not been informed as to her condition.”
On Wednesday night, the state government of Tennessee set out to execute Christa Pike. And then later that night, it administered “life-saving medical care.” I have often argued that the government tries to do too much; in this case, the state government of Tennessee set out to kill Pike and then sent her to a hospital save her life, all in the same day.
Somehow, I think they’re going to leave this crew out of the list of “groundbreaking pioneers” during next year’s Women’s History Month. Apparently, we’ll have to wait a little longer to smash the glass ceiling with the first successful all-woman state execution team.
George Carlin used to joke, “In prison, before they give you a lethal injection they swab your arm with alcohol. Well, they don’t want you to get an infection! And you can see their point, wouldn’t want some guy to go to hell and be sick. It would take a lot of the sportsmanship out of the whole execution.”
We have very confusing and contradictory approaches to execution in this country. Take the ritual of the last meal. In any other circumstance, if you went to your local, state, or federal government and said, “I would like you to serve me twelve fried shrimp, a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, fries, and a pound of strawberries, and give it to me for free,” any representative of the government would tell you “no” and to get lost.
But if you’re notorious serial killer John Wayne Gacy and that’s your request for your last meal, then the state of Illinois will say, “Coming right up, killer clown; would you prefer original or extra crispy?” Gacy may have raped, tortured, and murdered at least 33 young men and boys, but heaven forbid our government let him die on an empty stomach.
A whole lot of people hated Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, but we couldn’t send him off to his appointment in Hades without two pints of mint chocolate chip ice cream. Some people who deem the death penalty immoral object that their tax dollars get used to finance the execution process. I wonder how Florida taxpayers feel about their money being used to purchase and prepare steak, eggs, hash browns, toast, milk, and juice for Ted Bundy. The guy confessed to 30 murders and may well have killed more than 100 people.
The story of Christa Pike is dark, not on the scale of Bundy, but comparably cruel and sadistic. In 1995, at age 18, Pike and two other young women attacked 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, convinced that Slemmer was trying to steal her boyfriend:
Once they were swallowed up by the forest and completely isolated, Pike began accusing Miss Slemmer of trying to sleep with her boyfriend. The girl denied it, Pike became outraged and kneed her in the face.
She pulled out the meat cleaver and sliced Miss Slemmer’s’ stomach, then Shipp jumped in and gashed her across the chest. The victim begged her to stop, but her cries fell on deaf ears. The box cutter came out, and the three others tortured Miss Slemmer for the next 30 to 40 minutes, stabbing and slashing her hundreds of times.
Eventually, the three got bored with cutting, so Pike and Shipp held her down and carved a pentagram, the mark of the devil, in her chest with the meat cleaver.
The victim was still alive. At the end, Pike up a chunk of asphalt and smashed the girl’s head with it, again and again. And finally, after an hour of torture she was dead. Pike reached down fished a piece of her skull out of the gaping open hole in her head and put the blood-soaked fragment in her jacket pocket.
Last week, in the New York Times, journalist and former death row investigator Sophia Laurenzi argued that Pike did not belong on death row because she was 18 at the time of the grisly murder. “It is clear that 18- to 21-year-olds occupy a transitional stage of brain development and psychosocial maturity. At 18, the brain systems essential for impulse control, emotional regulation and weighing consequences are still developing. This matters when we decide whether the most irrevocable punishment is proportionate to the crime.”
At age 18, an American citizen can vote; drive; sign binding contracts; serve on a jury; serve in the military; open a bank account; skydive; serve alcoholic drinks; get a tattoo without parental consent; get a passport; use a meat slicer; and purchase lottery tickets, fireworks, cough suppressants, spray paint, and so on. It is difficult to believe that when it comes to stabbing and slashing someone hundreds of times, carving a pentagram in their chest, beating someone’s head in, and then taking a piece of their skull as a memento, you aren’t fully responsible for your actions on account of your age.
Note that in 2004, Pike was sentenced to another 25 years for attempting to kill another inmate; she was accused of attacking and attempting to strangle fellow inmate Patricia Jones with a shoestring. Pike was convicted of attempted first-degree murder:
“Patricia was running her (expletive) mouth to Natasha,” Pike said in the tape-recorded phone call. “And she is constantly doing it, you know. I hate that (expletive).”
Pike told her mother than Jones raised her fist as if to hit Cornett.
“I said, ‘Oh, (expletive) no!’?” Pike said. “And I wrapped that shoestring around her (neck) and tried to choke the (expletive) life out of her. She was passed out on the ground, Mama, twitching, foaming at the mouth. Her eyeballs were bugged out so far her eyelids were flipped up.”
There ought to be universal condemnation, or as close as we can get to that, for the botched execution attempt. The execution of a convicted murderer ought to be quick and minimally painful.
However, some want to go further; Melanie McDonagh, writing in The Spectator, cites the example of Anne Greene in Oxford in 1650, who was hung, presumed dead, and . . . was apparently not so dead at all:
Picture their surprise when, on opening the coffin, they found the body had a faint pulse. They and their colleagues rallied round and using a variety of means I shan’t go into – including a tobacco enema – they revived her. She wasn’t hanged again but lived for another 15 years, got married and had three children. Her survival was, by common consent, regarded as God’s way of indicating she should get off.
And so, I think, with Pike. With all due regard for the sensitivities of her wretched victim’s mother, it would be cruel to put her through death by injection twice. She has been executed once; that, even supporters of the death penalty must agree, is enough. Perhaps, since it is now 30 years since her conviction, it is time to free her.
No. Pike was convicted of first-degree murder with the aggravating circumstance of torture and abuse, conspiracy to commit murder, and attempted first-degree murder. She’s not walking out of prison a free woman because her requested all-female execution team did their jobs badly.
Our Charlie Cooke:
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.
Apparently, the state of Tennessee gives certain death row inmates an option:
Electrocution remained the only method of execution until 1998, when the state legislature added the choice of lethal injection to offenders who committed their crime(s) before January 1, 1999. In March 2000, legislation specified lethal injection as the primary method of execution, though death row offenders who committed their crime(s) prior to January 1, 1999, may still request electrocution.
There’s a report from Al Jazeera claiming Christa Pike requested death by firing squad, which is not on the menu of options. The Tennessean newspaper reported, “Attorneys argued that her small veins and her blood disorder, called thrombocytosis, would cause needless suffering, and sought an alternative to standard lethal injection: either hanging or a line in the jugular vein of her neck, rather than her arm.” The state of Tennessee has not executed a prisoner by hanging since 1913.
Governor Bill Lee has suspended all executions, pending a review. Senator Marsha Blackburn, the Republican candidate for governor who is extremely likely to succeed Lee, wants all future executions to be in the electric chair.
Jerri Green, Blackburn’s Democratic opponent, said the execution failed because Tennessee’s attorney general, Jonathan Skrmetti, “rushed this process.”
Christa Pike has been on death row since 1996.
I think it’s understandable to have some conflicted or contradictory views of the death penalty. Back in 2001, 19 percent of Gallup respondents said they usually opposed the death penalty but supported it for Timothy McVeigh. And if you don’t think the government is sufficiently responsible and careful with no-knock raids, civil asset forfeiture, warrantless surveillance, or tax audits, you might hesitate to entrust it with the power to kill someone, even if that individual has done something heinous.
Tennessee uses pentobarbital for lethal injections. With a prescription, it can be used to control epileptic seizures.
There are sleeping pills whose maximum safe dosage is 20 milligrams; ten times that amount can trigger a fatal overdose.
We have about 65,000 fatal drug overdoses each year (which, as bad as that figure is, represents a significant drop from a few years ago). Strangely, we have so many unintended fatal doses in this country, alongside a persistent difficulty medically inducing a pain-free form of execution.
ADDENDUM: Over in the Corner, I think it absurd for the U.S. Department of Justice to spend one cent, or one minute, reviewing Watergate, and whether former President Richard Nixon got a raw deal. Former Nixon employee Hugh Hewitt disagrees.
In other news, at the end of September, the national debt is $40,171,825,101,340.31.