Tennessee's Execution of Christa Pike Fails After Two Lethal Doses
A Tortured Execution and the Poverty of Our Justice
When a state twice tries to kill and fails, it is not merely a technical mishap but a confession that its harshest punishment exceeds its competence and its character.
The facts, so far as they are reported, are stark enough. A woman, long ago condemned for a very grievous murder, was to be put to death in Tennessee. The chosen instrument was a drug called pentobarbital, administered by injection. The first course failed to extinguish life; a second was attempted, and still she lived, reported alive and in critical condition. The written protocol, it seems, anticipated one failure and provided a second set of syringes, but was silent as to what should follow if death did not arrive on schedule. Here the law spoke with severity in its sentence, and with a curious muteness in its most terrible moment of execution.
When I wrote of the duties of the sovereign in the Wealth of Nations, I placed the exact administration of justice beside defence and public works. Exactness here means not only that the innocent be spared and the guilty condemned according to known rules, but that punishments be determinate, not left to chance, caprice, or the shifting skill of operators. A death sentence that becomes a lingering, uncertain struggle between chemistry and physiology is not more just because it is more painful; it is merely less governed. What was intended as a definitive act of law slides, almost imperceptibly, into something like an experiment.
In my Theory of Moral Sentiments, I asked the reader to consult an impartial spectator within his own breast. Let that spectator imagine the scene: a bound prisoner, two attempts upon her life, breathing and audibly suffering after the second, while officials confer over a protocol that has run out of instructions. Whatever we think of her crime, our fellow-feeling does not entirely withdraw from a creature exposed to torture. We may still judge her deserving of severe punishment, yet feel that this particular spectacle is not praise-worthy. To desire that our enemies suffer is one thing; to be pleased by the mechanical bungling of their torment is quite another.
The friends of such punishments will answer that all this horror arises from an accident; that in the ordinary course, the needle works swiftly, the business is concluded, the public is protected and crimes deterred. They will remind us of the murdered classmate, whose life admits of no reprieve, and of the sufferings of her family, who see justice in the keeping of the sentence. These considerations are weighty, and any humane person must acknowledge them. Yet if a punishment is to rest upon its supposed regularity and mildness, then every revelation of its irregular and torturous application undermines the very argument on which it was commended.
Consider, too, the incentives and knowledge on which this practice rests. An execution protocol is drawn up by committees who neither bear the needle themselves nor suffer upon its point. It presumes that drugs will work uniformly upon all bodies; that veins will always be found; that those charged with the task will perform without error, distraction, or fear. In other affairs of state, we have learned to mistrust contrivances that require unusual precision or virtue to function tolerably. The more complex and delicate the machinery, the more often it will fail in coarse hands. To make human suffering depend upon such refinements is to forget that we govern men, not automata.
The unseen costs of this failure are not confined to one prisoner. Officials must stand in the chamber and watch a human being linger between life and death, then return to their homes and families with that image in their minds. Spectators, reading of a “torturous” attempt that yet failed, cannot help but doubt the competence and even the decency of the system that acts in their name. The law, which ought to be revered as the firmest security of the labouring poor, begins to look instead like a clumsy giant: strong enough to seize, too unskilful to strike cleanly. Reverence once weakened is not easily restored.
I do not assert that no society may ever, under any circumstances, take life by public authority. I say only that a state which twice endeavours to destroy a captive body and does not, while its own rules fall silent at the crucial juncture, has advertised a failure in that exact justice which is its first obligation. When punishments reach a point where they demand more knowledge, more steadiness of hand, and more unanimity of conscience than frail mortals ordinarily possess, a prudent people will begin to reform them. A nation’s greatness is better measured by how seldom it needs such power than by how stubbornly it insists upon retaining it.
From the works cited
- An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations — The sovereign's three duties (defence, justice, public works and institutions) and the four maxims of taxation: equality, certainty, convenience, economy.
- An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations — Trace every policy to its effect on the price system and ask who bears the unseen cost: benefits are visible and concentrated, costs are diffuse and quiet.
- The Theory of Moral Sentiments — Judge conduct by the impartial spectator: what would a well-informed, disinterested observer feel about this action? Praise-worthiness matters more than praise.