Could the state of Tennessee, having twice botched the execution of Christa Pike, then assiduously revived her, handcuffed to her hospital bed, now try once more to put her to death? Quite possibly. Although the governor has put a temporary halt on state executions, he has refused to be drawn on Pike’s fate, hoping perhaps that her parlous medical condition will make his decision for him.
Senator Marsha Blackburn, the Republican candidate for governor in next month’s election, says simply they should abandon drug injections and bring back the electric chair.
Yet, despite near universal abhorrence at the botched attempts to kill Pike with two lethal doses of pentobarbital, the US death penalty machine rolls on. On Wednesday Texas executed Jamaal Howard (46), the 30th US death row inmate to die this year. And on Monday, Donald Trump approved the execution by firing squad of soldier Nidal Hasan, who in 2009 killed 13 of his colleagues at Fort Hood, Texas.
The US is among the 17 countries still carrying out the death penalty. Twenty-seven US states retain it on their books, although only 16, plus the federal government, have carried out an execution in the past decade. Last year 23 individuals were sentenced to death, joining some 2,000 on death row, many of them, like Pike, there for as long as 30 years.
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The number of Americans who find the death penalty morally acceptable has declined to 52 per cent. For the last several decades, abolitionists have made progress in changing the national conversation by moving from arguments about morality to focus on frequent miscarriages of justice, false convictions, racial discrimination in sentencing, and the cruelty inherent in the process itself as well as that inflicted in botched executions. One study estimated that 276, or 3.15 per cent, of the 8,776 executions carried out from 1890 to 2010 were botched. And since 1973, at least 203 people wrongly convicted and sentenced to death have been exonerated.
This barbaric practice must be ended.
