Freethought-Now

The botched recent execution of a Tennessee prisoner calls to mind the reason why my home state of Wisconsin became in 1853 the first to abolish the death penalty.

The very first execution in Wisconsin, a horrific public hanging, provoked the state Legislature’s crisis of conscience: Nearly 3,000 spectators witnessed John McCaffary struggling for five minutes during his 1851 hanging. Physicians were summoned to examine his pulse and only another 15 minutes later was he finally declared dead. Two years later, the Wisconsin Legislature did the right thing and passed the Death Penalty Repeal Act.

Nearly 175 years later, we don’t seem to have learned all that much. Death penalty executions gone-wrong tragically continue into the 21st century in the United States, with the Death Penalty Information Center documenting 64 botched executions since 1982.

Tennessee is one of 27 states that still have a barbaric death penalty, and one of about half of those states that has carried out executions in the past five years. It recently was the site of the excruciatingly botched execution by lethal injection of Christa Pike, a 50-year-old woman found guilty at age 18 of torturing and murdering a female teenager, while her boyfriend and co-defendant, a few months younger at age 17, evaded the death penalty. The controversial (unsuccessful) execution was the first of a woman in Tennessee in more than 200 years. Her attorneys asserted that her grievous history of mental illness, sexual abuse and extreme trauma should have figured into her sentence. (I’ll spare you all the details, but the sexual abuse ranges from her grandmother’s boyfriend forcing his penis into her mouth for years starting when she was a toddler — an outrage that her school became aware of and yet police were never called, to being raped by a neighbor at age 11, which was prosecuted.)

The lethal injection execution was supposed to take 10 minutes but went on for almost an hour. Pike survived not just one but two lethal doses of pentobarbital, and is in critical condition with probable brain damage. Prison officials started seven different intravenous lines, with the caustic drug leaking into soft tissue, leaving her arms swollen, blistered and chemically burned. Pike herself reportedly tried to guide officials to a possible better site and “could be heard crying, whimpering and breathing loudly throughout the procedure,” her lawyers said. The warning by her attorneys that Pike’s blood-clotting condition and small veins might cause unnecessary pain and suffering during a lethal injection had gone unheeded.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has paused executions while calling for an independent review of lethal injection protocols. That’s a start, but not good enough.

The United States is one of only about 17 nations in the world where recent executions have been confirmed. Iran topped the list last year with at least 2,150 executions, then Saudi Arabia with 356 …  then follows the United States with 47. (Unconfirmed executions are into the thousands in China, and hundreds in such countries as Egypt, Bangladesh and Nigeria.)

Is this the company we U.S. citizens want to be seen in?

For one brief, shining moment, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, our nation’s great, first Black justice, prevailed in his passionate quest to overturn the death penalty, in the 1972 case Furman v. Georgia. By a 5-4 vote, the court held that Georgia’s death penalty statute was “cruel and unusual” and violated the Eighth Amendment, subsequently voiding 40 death penalty statutes and commuting the sentences of 629 death row inmates around the country. Capital punishment advocates got to work rewriting state statutes to get around the Furman decision, and four years later, the high court reversed itself and ruled the death penalty constitutional.

The “eye-for-an-eye, life-for-a-life” Old Testament edict fuels the death penalty in our nation. Let’s learn something from Tennessee’s shameful case and get rid of the primitive Bronze Age “justice” known as the death penalty.

Disclaimer: The views in this column are of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

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