WARNING: the contents of this week’s post are disturbing. Discretion is advised.
I usually write these blogs from the heart, because a week’s worth of life’s events is sure to have a profound effect on feelings, reactions, and resolve.
The news media is overwhelmed by the events of this past week revolving around an execution gone wrong. In hindsight, I think that all signs pointed to a near certainty that something would go wrong, so I wanted to deconstruct some of the events here.
I say “some” because this case has been reported exhaustively, and other sources can fill in what you may not know already. I want to get to the why of what happened and the why about what should have, and did not, happen on the day of execution.
The story began back in January 1995, over thirty years ago. A group of Job Corps participants in Knoxville included a woman named Christa Pike, another named Colleen Slemmer, a man with whom Christa had a relationship, and a third woman. Christa was concerned that Colleen was taking an interest in the boyfriend, so she concocted a plan.
The trio lured Colleen to a secluded area near the campus of the University of Tennessee, where Christa spent a half hour or more inflicting wounds while the other woman stood watch. The man participated in carving a pentagram on Colleen’s chest. Finally, Christa bludgeoned her supposed rival, then collected a bone fragment and left the area with it in her jacket pocket. Later she showed others the trophy and bragged about her accomplishment. Meanwhile, Colleen’s body was soon found, and the three were arrested quickly.
In 1996, Christa was found guilty of first-degree murder. The man was jailed and may become eligible for parole, and the other woman participant turned state’s evidence and received parole, but Christa was sentenced to death by electrocution. By the time a death warrant was issued this year for Christa, after three decades of seclusion as the only female inmate in the condemned section of the all-male prison, the execution method had officially been changed to lethal injection.
The Tennessee prison system has had the same difficulties with intravenous life-ending procedures as other states. In this as in other cases, a physician cannot set up the needle in a vein as an instrument of death, because the act violates the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm. Euthanasia is a slippery topic which we won’t go through here, but the error rate for poor IV placement for executions is imbalanced in the best situations, because ordinary prison staff are performing the procedure.
Add to this the fact that one of the administrators responsible for handling prison death row inmates had apparently been transferred to Tennessee from another system in which lethal injections also were mishandled, and the errors compound to a level one would not believe possible in an advanced society.
I can’t wrap my mind around how it’s possible that substance abusers can track down a tiny, untapped spot on their anatomy to inject whatever makes them feel good, but officials in a controlled environment can’t do the same.
What happened here was that Christa Pike had more than one condition which would make intravenous access nearly impossible for none but the most qualified personnel, none of whom could be summoned to the task because of ethics. Therefore, why would anybody responsible for this execution delude themselves into thinking it would be a normal day in the death chamber?
The ineptitude of the people involved has now caused a furor over the entire capital punishment environment. The methods of death handed out by homicidal persons are as varied as fish in the sea, but our execution methods are becoming fewer instead of more focused on the most effective way to achieve the result.
We are better than this, and rather than leave our world to an anarchic system in which we don’t have a way of sending our most evil criminals to a greater judgment because we can’t get one good method that works, we need to set a system and keep to it.
I have blogged before about execution methods, and the three which seem to have the most sensible methodology are firing squad, the electric chair, and hanging.
The electric chair sends voltage through the body to cause nearly instantaneous cessation of function. It can go wrong if there is something amiss with the electricity source.
Hanging sends the condemned plummeting through a trap door while restrained, with a rope around the neck designed to cause an instant break under the body’s own weight during the descent, with strangulation assured as a backup measure. This has gone wrong when the rope was not properly applied. A broken neck also does not guarantee instant death.
Which leaves the firing squad. Several markspersons aiming rifles containing lethal bullets at the condemned from a short distance. No electricity or ropes to get wrong, and short of hiring persons with poor aim or eyesight, the likelihood of error is limited to poor care of the firearms.
There is also speculation about the drug used in the execution, which may have been of questionable efficacy. A bullet has no such issue. No veins to find, no prolonged fumbling with medical equipment nobody was trained to handle. Three words which put an end to what some feel is too long a stay on the planet after taking another life so abruptly.
Ready. Aim. Fire.
What will happen to Christa is still uncertain. An insufficient dose of lethal drugs which seem to have been delivered under the skin rather than into an impossible to find vein, has left her unconscious in a hospital. The victim, Colleen Slemmer’s, family received public funding to attend the execution and left for home with nothing. The world on both sides of the death penalty issue sits and waits.
The commissioner running the corrections department resigned just days after the failed execution and will step down to allow an interim person to take over. Tennessee has two failed prisoner death sentences on record for this year, and the ethics of what to do in Christa Pike’s case is going to be a polarizing chapter in how we handle those who take innocent lives and are sentenced by our justice system to forfeit their own.
However you feel about homicide, prisons, executions or the human condition, this is something we should all watch closely.
