Facing the Death Penalty
In recent weeks, tolerance for the death penalty, as it is carried out in the United States, has been sorely tested twice. On September 30th, the state of Tennessee bungled its attempt to kill Christa Pike, who survived two injections of pentobarbital. Eight days later, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth gleefully invited the nation to tune in, via live stream, for the death by firing squad of Nidal Hasan, scheduled for December 3rd. It took another week for President Donald Trump to call off the broadcast, amid an uproar. He said, in a Truth Social post, that, though he thought a live stream would send a useful message about America’s strength, he accepted that “many very good and well meaning people would rather not watch.” He made it sound like a programming preference, not a moral one.
Pike’s botched execution did not result in Tennessee looking strong. Though the event was not public, there were watch-rooms connected to the death chamber. In one sat May Martinez, the mother of Colleen Slemmer, who was nineteen years old when, in 1995, Pike, then eighteen, beat and killed her, with the help of two teen-age accomplices. A group of journalists, designated as “media witnesses,” sat in another. At 7:26 P.M., according to the journalists, a black curtain fitted to a large glass window was pulled back, and they saw Pike strapped to a gurney. Prison personnel had already set I.V. lines and left the chamber to begin the flow of pentobarbital from yet another room.
Through a microphone, the journalists listened as Pike spoke what were meant to be her last words—about love—and sang with her Buddhist spiritual adviser. Then they heard her ask if her arm was supposed to hurt as much as it did—as if her veins would burst. She raised her head and kicked her legs, knocking a sheet off the gurney. At 7:46 P.M., the curtain was closed. It was opened three minutes later, presumably so that the witnesses could see the effects of a second, backup dose. What they saw was a woman who was clearly alive. At 8:05 P.M., the curtain closed again, but the microphone stayed on, leaving the journalists with the sound of Pike’s labored breathing and snoring. When, at 8:53 P.M., they were finally told to go, they were pretty sure that Pike was not dead.
“I cannot emphasize enough how much of whatever just happened happened behind a closed curtain,” Steven Hale, of the Nashville Banner, said at a press conference afterward. In the days that followed, more details came out. Before the curtain opened, according to Pike’s lawyers, medical workers had struggled with the I.V., using at least seven needles. A working theory is that a line was misplaced, or that a vein was blown, causing the pentobarbital to spread into the surrounding tissue. Pike’s lawyers had warned, in court filings, that she had blood and circulatory conditions that put her at risk for precisely this outcome. (They have also argued that sexual violence Pike endured as a child should have weighed more heavily in her sentencing.)
Lethal injection is the most common method of capital punishment in the U.S. And yet, according to the Associated Press, I.V. problems have derailed more than half a dozen executions since 2009, including one in Tennessee this past May. Pike’s case stands out because the execution team proceeded with the injection of pentobarbital anyway. The level of recklessness in that decision will no doubt be a focus of the investigation that Bill Lee, the governor of Tennessee, has ordered. Lee has delayed other pending executions, but he has not yet said if the state will try again to kill Pike, who was unconscious for several days before waking up in a hospital, confused and in pain. It’s unclear if she will fully recover. Last week, it emerged that even the call from the prison for an ambulance was mishandled. Pike’s lawyers have described what happened to her as torture. An unanswerable question is how the night might have ended had no one been watching.
There is a distinction, of course, between insisting on witnesses and staging a spectacle. Hegseth promoted the live stream in an interview with Jack Posobiec, a right-wing influencer, on the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. Hasan, a former Army major and psychiatrist, shot and killed twelve fellow-soldiers (one of whom was pregnant) and a civilian at Fort Hood, in 2009, ahead of a deployment to Afghanistan. “No-brainer. Execution by firing squad,” Hegseth said. “And we’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public.” There hasn’t been a public execution in the United States in almost ninety years. Hasan is confined to a wheelchair; he was paralyzed as a result of the firefight that ended his shooting spree. He has said that he wants to be a martyr, and one of the many problems with Hegseth’s plan was that it might have helped him get his wish. But the more profound issue was the grubby death-cult revelry that a live stream would entail.
Even some supporters of capital punishment, including a number of Republican lawmakers, seemed repelled by the prospect. In recent years, only a few countries have been known to conduct public executions, notably Iran and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, of the thirty-eight nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, only two—the U.S. and Japan—regularly carry out death sentences at all. (China, which is not in the O.E.C.D., does, too.)
The Eighth Amendment forbids “cruel and unusual punishments”; the Supreme Court has long said that the death penalty is permissible, even as it has gradually tightened its standard. In 1988, for example, the Court banned the death penalty for crimes committed by someone under the age of sixteen. The Justices only raised the age to eighteen in 2005. But such adjustments, welcome as they are, cannot conceal the essential brutality of the enterprise; the Pike and Hasan cases show how vanishingly fine the line is between a routine execution and an unbearable one.
When Markwayne Mullin, the Secretary of Homeland Security, was asked about Hegseth’s live stream before Trump called it off, he said, “No one has to watch.” In the age of TikTok and autoplay videos, that’s simply not true. But Mullin’s reply also seemed to convey a hope that no one would notice the actions and the character of this Administration, with officials, such as Hegseth, who appear unashamed of their worst instincts. One can’t always look away. ♦