“Capital punishment presents moral questions that philosophers, theologians, and statesmen have grappled with for millennia,” Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in 2015 — so the Constitution’s Framers “handled it the same way they handled many other controversial issues: they left it to the People to decide.”
The late legal titan adduced the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee that no person shall be “deprived of life . . . without due process of law” to offer a proclamation so intuitive that any middle schooler ought to grasp it: “It is impossible to hold unconstitutional that which the Constitution explicitly contemplates.”
Progressive elites, who have no problem with homicide when victims are unborn children or born children of mothers pleading “postpartum psychosis,” no longer hold the death penalty for society’s worst offenders in high regard.
But those of an older and wiser mentality continue to dispense the ultimate punishment for the most hardened and impenitent criminals.
That’s why Tennessee sentenced Pike to death.
At the age of 18, Pike and her boyfriend lured a 19-year-old classmate into the Knoxville woods and beat, slashed and mutilated her.
After a half-hour of torture, Pike killed the classmate by crushing her skull with a slab of asphalt.
Over three decades later, when Tennessee finally attempted to kill Pike, the state’s method of choice was lethal injection.
Amazingly, Tennessee failed.
Today, Pike is “up and walking” in the hospital.
She’s a bit mentally “foggy,” according to her lawyers, but don’t pity her too much.
Pike’s botched execution is an astounding embarrassment for the state of Tennessee.
But the only reason there are botched executions today is because of the left’s decades-long legal crusade to intentionally throw sand in the gears of the execution process — over the objection of a majority of Americans, who have long favored capital punishment.
In the 1960s, activist NAACP lawyers launched a campaign to challenge the death penalty on grounds of “systemic racial bias.” (Sound familiar?)
They argued the death penalty constitutes “cruel and unusual punishment” under the Eighth Amendment.
The culmination came in 1972, when the Supreme Court ludicrously held that, as a practical matter, the death penalty is unconstitutional.
Following massive backlash, the court walked that back only four years later.
But the legal battle was only beginning.
In 1977, the court banned the death penalty for rapists of adult women.
In 1986, it did the same for the mentally insane.
In 2002, the court added those with intellectual disabilities to the list.
In 2005, the court ended capital punishment for those who were minors at the time of the crime.
And in 2008, the court did the same for child rapists.
None of this is based in constitutional interpretation — it’s all legislation from the bench.
The left has also waged war on lethal injection drug “cocktails,” similarly claiming that execution method constitutes a “cruel and unusual punishment.”
Activists lost their first Supreme Court challenge in 2008; they narrowly lost again in the 2015 case that sparked Scalia’s ire, and in a similar case from 2019.
But where the activists have failed in the courts, they have succeeded elsewhere.
Chemical companies have stopped manufacturing traditional lethal injection drugs.
That’s why we have the current “cocktails,” and the corresponding litigation.
It’s all part of a concerted effort to end the death penalty — whether by judicial kill shot or by chemical fiat.
This is all absurd.
America was founded on Hebraic, Old Testament values.
That’s why most Americans still understand that the only moral response to the most heinous crimes and the most unapologetic criminals is, after due process, to take the criminal’s life.
Criminologists call this “retributive justice.”
There’s another term that comes to mind: common sense.
Pike committed an unspeakable murder.
Her lawyers took due process to its (comical) extreme — three decades of appeals and stalls.
It is now finally time.
She must be put to death for the murder of Colleen Slemmer.
When Tennessee tries again to do so, it should spare us all the indignity of another lethal injection attempt.
Dust off Old Sparky — or Old Smokey, as the electric chair is known in the Volunteer State.
For that matter, how about the gallows?
And then there’s what is actually the most reliable, and thereby humane, method of execution: firing squad.
That’s what President Donald Trump just ordered for Nidal Hasan, the jihadist of Fort Hood massacre infamy.
Trump won’t get any plaudits from the left for his humaneness.
But red states should follow his lead.
That includes Tennessee, where the firing squad isn’t legal. That should change.
But for now, justice must come another way for Pike.
Josh Hammer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and author of “Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West.”