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After surviving two doses of a drug intended to kill her, Christa Pike is at the centre of a high-profile legal battle that’s shone fresh light on the absurdity of humane execution.
Last week, Christa Pike survived an attempt on her life. Now doctors at the Tennessee hospital where she’s being held are working tirelessly to save her. Reports state Pike is ‘angry and confused’ about what happened to her, but has, by all accounts, defied the odds: she survived two doses of a drug designed to end human life.
The caveat to this story is that Pike’s would-be-killer is the US government. In 1995, she was just 18 when her and her then-boyfriend lured a classmate into the woods in Knoxville, tortured and murdered her. Pike has been on death row ever since – the only woman on Tennessee’s death row and the first woman to be sentenced to capital punishment in the modern era.
After decades awaiting an execution date, Pike received a lethal injection at Riverbend maximum-security prison last week. But after two doses (the first of which failed even to sedate her), the 50-year-old is now conscious and able to talk. That Pike is being nursed back to health by the same state that tried to kill her is an absurd reality, but one that perfectly captures the grotesque and outlandish concept of ‘humane execution.’
The lethal injection was introduced as a counter to previous capital punishment tools like the electric chair and firing squad, with the logic that it served a more benevolent alternative. Ironically, both of these systems have been reintroduced after a number of botched lethal injections and issues accessing the drug used, pentobarbital.
The notion that killing another human being can ever be merciful is what underpins one of America’s most complex and contentious debates. State killing has never been wholly embraced by either legislators or voters. But it continues to operate in a handful of states, punishing the country’s most violent criminals with the same act for which they were incarcerated.
It might sound mawkish, but the adage ‘an eye for an eye’ has always come to mind when I think about the death penalty. Strip away the many arguments for and against capital punishment and the sentiment ultimately rings true. But there’s also the many other developments of modern criminal law – not least the advent of DNA testing – that have thrown the concept of state killing under a microscope.
