COMMENTARY:
On September 30, Corrections professionals in Tennessee tried to kill Christa Pike. They almost succeeded.
Now, health care professionals in Tennessee are trying to save her life. She is on a ventilator in critical condition in a specialized critical care hospital. If the health care professionals are successful, the Corrections professionals will presumably try to kill her again.
Does that make sense to anybody on either side of the death penalty debate?
In 1935, the DuPont company came up with the ad slogan “Better living through chemistry.” About a decade later, the world looked on in horror as millions of Jews were executed by poison gas in the Nazi concentration camps.
In the years after World War II, most civilized nations responded to the atrocities of the Holocaust by banning the death penalty. We came to the opposite conclusion, seeing a neat and tidy way to continue executions without all the mess of a firing squad.
Our government sold Americans on the concept of humane executions. The condemned would simply go to sleep and never wake up. And, sometimes it works that way. But more often these days it doesn’t.
This was the second botched execution in Tennessee this year. There have been 75 botched executions by lethal injection in the U.S. thus far, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Our problem is, it’s just not as easy to buy drugs intended to kill people as it used to be. The rest of the world finds the practice ghoulish, and has outlawed the production of those drugs.
What’s a nation to do? So many people condemned to death and no way to efficiently kill them. In Tennessee, Gov.Bill Lee has suspended all executions scheduled for the rest of this year … reluctantly, I presume … and has called for a third-party investigation to determine what went wrong.
Christa Pike was convicted in 1996. She has been on death row for more than 30 years. No wonder Lee is so eager to get things cranked back up again. That’s quite the backlog. And it makes me wonder, who benefits from an execution conducted 30 years after the crime? How many of those who were seeking retribution three decades ago are still alive?
Americans love our mythology … and none is more romanticized than the Old West, a time when gunslingers settled disputes by which one was quicker on the draw. Our love of that mythology is why we can’t have common-sense gun laws today. And, that “hang ‘em high” mentality is why we still insist on the death penalty, even after so many botched executions.
I say we make a choice … either join with the rest of the civilized world and ban the death penalty, or go back to public hangings and firing squads,
We need to give up on the notion of neat and tidy executions. We’re killing people. That’s not supposed to be neat and tidy.
There are arguments to be made for the death penalty. Let’s have that debate, and if the nation decides executions are still needed, fine … that’s democracy. But nobody should pretend that taking a human life is just another medical procedure.
Walter Rubel can be reached at waltrubel@gmail.com
Walt Rubel’s opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of KRWG Public Media or NMSU.