I read with dismay today of Tennessee’s botched execution of Christa Pike, who had been sentenced to death for her role in the cruel and gruesome murder of a young woman, Colleen Slemmer, in 1995.
Not only was justice postponed for three decades, but when the time came, the authorities couldn’t even get the job done.
As I wrote twelve years ago, about a similar story:
We will assume, arguendo, that what we want is a means of execution that is sudden, 100% reliable, and can safely be assumed to cause no lingering discomfort.
Is this really so difficult to produce? How about, say, three simultaneous shotgun blasts to the back of the head, at point-blank range? That ought to satisfy our criteria. What about dropping a ten-ton flat steel slab from a height of about fifteen feet? Why not a Semtex neck-pillow? (I could go on, but you get the point: this is easy.)
What am I missing here? Why all this fussing? Given what we are trying to accomplish here this should be, if you will forgive me, a no-brainer.
Here’s the only answer I can think of: we’re squeamish. All the methods I’ve suggested are messy, and create a lot of splatter. I think that we prefer silly, complicated arrangements — gas chambers, electrocution, and lethal injection — because they make killing the condemned more painless for us.
We are a civilization in its dotage. As they say on Twitter: “Ancestor cry.”
4 Comments
Wimmens. This is why we must repeal the 19th amendment. They are bleeding hearts. They’re worried about killing a person who committed a crime so horrible they must be killed, but only in a kind, gentle sort of way. We don’t want them to suffer, while we humanely end their life.
Think about that. That’s how fucked up and twisted they are… they’re worried that this horrifically violent criminal, who gave no such thoughts to their victims, don’t suffer too much while we prematurely end their ability to breathe oxygen.
There’s something to be said about bringing back the guillotine and making it a public spectacle, as in the French days of old. Painless and humane, but sufficiently graphic as to testify to the gruesomeness of the crime (murder, rape). Problem, of course, is that you don’t want this device to accompany terrors and Robespierres, where it simply becomes an instrument of fear and tyranny.
I agree with Jason that capital punishment should be public. It is pointless if it does not dramatize public wrath in the face of outrageous violations of public morality. It is also pointless when it occurs decades after the crime, since this provides no catharsis. I’m not sure why we don’t have the stomach for executions that are public and prompt, but I suspect it is because we have little confidence in our public morality. We certainly enjoy exhibiting wrath and outrage, but it is not clear that these are for us moral feelings.
In any case, our preposterous machinery of capital punishment tells me that we don’t really believe that anyone deserves capital punishment. And we have consequently made capital punishment cruel and unusual.
Not all women and not all men want to see the guilty go unpunished. You could say she was punished by having to spend 30 years in prison which is equivalent to a wasted life but as to whether in this case the punishment fit the crime, the answer is probably a big fat no.