The death penalty is a barbaric practice that no civilized society should countenance. Yet the US is one of the countries that seems to take delight in executing people even though it sometimes botches the process.
The latest case involves the first woman to be executed in Tennessee in 200 years but she failed to die even after receiving the two lethal injections. What the observing journalists present described was macabre.
The lone woman on Tennessee’s death row was still alive after she was administered two lethal injections, her lawyer said in a motion seeking to halt her execution Wednesday night, a stunning development after the Supreme Court had stepped in to allow the state to put her to death.
At 8:26 p.m. local time, witnesses said “executioners had injected both syringes of lethal injection chemicals” and Christa Pike was “still alive and snoring,” her lawyers said in a federal court filing.
They said Pike “has not lost consciousness and still has a heartbeat” and that curtains to the death chamber “have gone down twice.”
Journalists who witnessed the attempted execution described snoring and complaints from Pike about pain, as well as her kicking her feet so often that she knocked off the sheets laid on her. At times, the curtain was closed and journalists could only hear sounds.
…An ambulance was seen arriving at the prison where Pike was to be executed and then leaving. Medical aid was being administered, according to online federal court records.
The Tennessee governor Bill Lee, who had earlier refused a plea for clemency, has suspended all executions pending an inquiry into what went ‘wrong’ (or ‘right’ if you are an opponent of the death penalty).
Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, called the botched execution attempt “singular and unparalleled”, according to the Associated Press.
She said her group was aware of seven other people that have survived medical problems due to an execution team’s failure to access a vein to administer lethal injection drugs, but nobody had remained alive after receiving the drugs used in such executions.
In May, Tennessee officials called off the lethal injection of Tony Carruthers, another convicted murderer, after failing for more than an hour to place an intravenous line into his arm.
…Lawyers for Pike filed an emergency motion to the Tennessee supreme court after the second pentobarbital dose was administered asking to halt and stay the execution, saying she was in “unnecessary agony”, and that the state was violating her right to be executed free of cruel and unusual punishment.
In a later statement, they said: “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,” the statement said.
I am not hopeful that they will impose a permanent moratorium because the governor and the Republicans have no qualms in putting people to death and once they get past the inquiry, they will try to kill her once again.
Like they say about MAGA: “The cruelty is the point”.
There is no correlation between using the death penalty the death penalty often and bringing down crime -- if there was, China, Saudi Arabia and Iran would be virtually crime free. The cruelty of killing people creates the superficial impression of “getting though on crime” (the way Dubya’s torture made the impression of getting though on terrorism) while real efforts to bring down crime would be costly and complicated , requiring a sustained effort much longer than the time between elections.
.
Also, there were some cities in Scotland that once had alarming crime rates. They succeded in bringing down crime without bringing back executions.
If she dies before they get a second attempt, I would not be at all surprised if they went to the Supreme Court demanding the right to put her disembodied head on a spike on Trump’s arch. Or Tennessee‘s equivalent. They’d sell tickets too.
It is possible to painlessly euthanise an elephant.
Why are the septics incapable of painlessly euthanising a human?
Unless they enjoy the spectacle.
@chigau
Your last sentence…….
I’ve been hearing about this from multiple sites recently.
Yeah, as birgerjohansson says above, really, ‘the cruelty is the point’. After multiple public cases in which someone provably innocent was railroaded onto Death Row by people who were more interested in looking like they were being tough on crime than in actually finding the real perpetrator (and as a result leaving the real perpetrator free to strike again, something these ‘tough on crime’ folks try to never think about), Canada abolished the death penalty at a national level. Meanwhile, in the U.S., the Texas governor once refused to grant clemency to someone on Death Row even after having been presented with proof that the person involved was innocent: a proven innocent man, with the actual perpetrator identified, was put to death. It’s macho fantasies about being tough, and any actual appearance of justice is an afterthought.
Our system here in Canada is very very far from perfect, but ‘better than the U.S.’ is way too damn low a bar in many cases.
(As I recall, one of the issues driving the weird drug selection is that, for obvious reasons, a lot of drug companies don’t want their drugs associated with state executions, and so the cocktail is put together from drugs that are either from companies that are fine with this or things that are so generic that everybody makes them.)
@3 chigau:
On a more practical level, the law and practice around the death penalty is an arcane mess.
The restrictions and rules imposed by the courts are different from state to state so every state has to develop it’s own methodology.
State don’t want to change procedure because any change means another round of lawsuits over the methodology. The above problems mean that the methodologies are often simply outdated, better ones are known but it isn’t clear if they would be legal.
Companies don’t want to sell to the states just for use in execution. It’s a matter of publicity and the risk of lawsuits rather then concern but it limits the options for the states.
The states have trouble finding qualified people to do the execution. Mistakes in procedure in the actual execution have happened.
Information about the effects of these drugs at these dosage levels is limited. The doses needed for reliable death and the side effects at those levels is not something actively studied.
All of which argues against the death penalty even if you thought it was justified in some cases but the death penalty states are fixated on the importance of punishment. This is badly misguided but it makes for good publicity in some states.
A painless and reliable death is so easy and cheap to produce, no one behind this farce can possibly be considered competent. Escort the prisoner to a comfortable chair in a sealed room, give them their favourite snacks and drink, then fill the room with nitrogen -- the person will sleep to death without ever noticing a change in the air.
Hell, the problem was solved long ago with beheading, still practised in some places today, but America chooses to call that ‘barbaric’ and then opts for a method like this.
I have written on this already elsewhere, but I think the problem here is religious and cultural, having to do with what is intended by the word “punishment.” We are stuck in a paradox here, because we are supposed to eschew cruel and unusual punishment, but what is meant here is physical cruelty only. The whole point of capital punishment is psychological cruelty, so the ridiculous drug cocktail is required to insure, supposedly, that the victim, while feeling no physical pain, is subjected to the maximum psychological cruelty, of being paralyzed but conscious, not only of impending death, but of the very moment of death.