Christa Pike is the 50-year-old American woman who was executed in the state of Tennessee and lived to tell the tale after her execution did not result in her death and is now back in prison to await her fate.
She had been convicted with her boyfriend of the gruesome murder of a 19-year-old girl in 1995, motivated by excessive jealousy and a cruel and psychopathic disposition borne of borderline personality disorder.
It was a sustained attack that shocked America for its ferocity and the ritualistic torture of the victim by both herself and her boyfriend. She was 18 at the time of the murder and sentenced to death; her boyfriend was 17 and sentenced to life imprisonment – and may even be released on parole in 2031.
The difference in punishment between them is explicable but no less arbitrary just because a line had to be drawn somewhere. Both the state of Tennessee and the US Supreme Court determined that the death penalty for crimes committed before an offender’s 18th birthday constituted cruel and unusual punishment that the constitution prohibits.
Unsurprisingly, Christa Pike appealed several times against conviction and the death sentence but they all failed. Her grounds criticised the conduct of her defence by her lawyers at trial, which is unpersuasive in cases in which the guilt of the accused is beyond doubt.
A last-minute plea for clemency to the governor of Tennessee was refused, and a stay of execution by the state appeal court for new mitigation to be considered was reversed by the US Supreme Court.
So, the legal path to her execution by lethal injection was cleared and it went ahead on September 30, 2026. She was taken from prison to a cell adjacent to the execution chamber where she was kept in solitary confinement until the time of execution. She was then strapped onto a stretcher and taken to the execution chamber with her arms akimbo and ready for the injections to be administered.
You would think that as this was intended to be a humane execution she would have been sedated beforehand, but this did not happen because the first lethal injection was supposed to render her unconscious first and then induce death by cardiac arrest with a booster second injection if required.
But it was not her karma to die – she became a Buddhist a couple of years ago – at least not yet. The injections were not administered properly, and she survived her execution though any damage the botched injections may have caused is not known. The known evidence suggests she was not rendered unconscious and suffered physical pain and had to be admitted to hospital to recover from her ordeal.
As she was conscious, the deep psychological suffering she endured in the twilight zone between life and death consumed by fear and anxiety can only be imagined. The question now is whether it counts as cruel and unusual punishment precisely because it was negligently carried out and caused her so much pain and suffering that second attempt would be unconstitutional.
It is true that in 1947 the US Supreme Court ruled that death by electrocution a second time was not cruel and unusual punishment: “the cruelty against which the constitution protects a convicted man is a cruelty inherent in the method of punishment, not the necessary suffering in any method involved in extinguishing life humanely.”
But the rationale of that decision may need to be revisited because execution is a process and if it is to be repeated it has to be considered in terms of its cumulative effect. An execution by lethal injection may be a humane method if performed properly, but cruel if it goes so badly wrong, as it did for Christa on September 30, it ought not to be repeated.
In the US the death penalty is available in 27 states of the union as well as the federal government and the US military. The arguments in favour of the death penalty in America are that it is a necessary safety valve that needs to be available to prevent people taking the law in their own hands in a country where gun ownership is lawful and widespread. The availability of the death penalty in some states in the US is a right to punish offenders according to values as the states perceive them.
Some states have abolished the death penalty, some have retained it but do not execute anyone at all, while others execute at will, some more than others – Florida has carried out 17 executions this year. Tennessee suspended all executions after the Christa Pike case.
The present US government is very pro the death penalty and there can be no denying its popularity in some far-right circles – executing murderers and deporting immigrants is popular with populist politicians. Europe may move in the same direction. While it is generally accepted in Europe that the death penalty would not deter many murders, popular opinion is notoriously in favour of executing offenders for particularly egregious offences.
The death penalty was abolished gradually in Europe by evolution and amendment of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) that initially permitted it until it was banned in time of peace in 1983 and in time of war in 2002.
The rationale for its abolition was that member states of the Council of Europe could not justify to themselves the premeditated deliberate destruction of human life by the state. It was thought that the death penalty involved physical pain and intense psychological suffering that ought to be prohibited in civilised countries.
The fundamental legal objection to the death penalty is not so much that some offenders do not deserve the death penalty but rather that the state’s duty to secure the right to life is incompatible with the power to inflict death.
The European Court of Human Rights’ approach to cruelty is different to the US Supreme Courts’ because its starting point is that the deliberate and premeditated imposition of the death penalty is the ultimate form of cruel punishment, whereas according to the US Supreme Court it is possible to extinguish human life humanely without violating the prohibition on cruel punishment.
