Would a Firing Squad Have Been More ‘Humane’ for Christa Pike?

Christa Pike, the Tennessee woman convicted of murdering Colleen Slemmer in 1995, was a dead woman walking Wednesday.

Whether or when she will walk again remains to be seen. But, as of Thursday evening, she was alive, having survived the state’s attempt to execute her via lethal injection. Twice.

Put differently, it did not go as planned. Correctional staff administered a (supposedly) lethal dose of pentobarbital, a barbiturate, around 7:30 p.m. “My arm feels like it’s about to burst open,” Pike said, according to a reporter who was there to witness the execution. Pike thrashed and did not die. So staff closed the death-chamber curtain and administered another dose, after which she began loudly snoring and struggling for air. Pike was subsequently transferred to a hospital, where she was intubated and put on a ventilator as medical personnel worked “to save [her] life,” her attorneys wrote in a court filing yesterday.

That the state would try to rescue Pike moments after attempting to kill her captures how logically sound the government’s general approach to capital punishment is. Which is to say, it does not make much sense at all, as the state has sought to sanitize something that—wherever you fall in the debate—can’t be.

Lethal injection was first authorized by Oklahoma in 1977 and first used in Texas in 1982. Its introduction was part of a tortured history of trying, in part, to increase the humanity of killing people. Before a fatal cocktail of drugs was the electric chair, the gas chamber, the gallows, and the firing squad.

Reservations specifically with the electric chair are easy to understand. The contraption made its debut in the late 1800s after New York Gov. David Hill, who said hanging had “come down to us from the dark ages,” commissioned a report “to investigate…the most humane and practical method of carrying into effect the sentence of death.” The conclusion it came to: death by electricity.

The benefit of hindsight would have been helpful. It takes several minutes to shock the heart into submission. In reality, the electric chair has become synonymous with torture, both for the condemned and for those condemned to watch.

Graduating to lethal injection removed much of the latter—it is, of course, less of an assault on the eyes. It looks like a medical procedure, something that could be routine were it not for the setting and the last words. But in once again seeking to make killings humane, the government settled on a method that can still be intensely painful for the individual, as Pike’s experience suggests. It can cost taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars for one dose. And it holds the unenviable distinction of having the highest botched-execution rate.

It’s not close. From 1890 to 2010, there were 8,776 executions in the United States, according to data compiled by the Death Penalty Information Center. The overall rate of botched executions—taking into account all methods—was 3.15 percent. The rate for lethal injections was more than double that: 7.2 percent. Gas came next at 5.4 percent, then hanging at 3.12 percent, then electrocution at 1.92 percent.

Only one method has a perfect (as perverse as that sounds) record: firing squad. It is also, ironically, the least-used approach, having been relied upon a mere 34 times over that 120-year period.

The obvious reason lays bare the core of this dilemma. Firing squads, perhaps more than any method, put the necessary brutality of the death penalty on full display. You line someone up against a wall and shoot them in the heart. Unlike the electric chair, the process is rapid, potentially minimizing the condemned’s suffering even as the spectacle may maximally disturb those who witness. Lethal injection dresses up the process in something different: clinical, gentle, civilized. But the goal is the same: to kill someone.

This debate, for more than a century, has focused on how to do that humanely. It doesn’t really exist. Killing people is, by definition, at odds with the definition of the word—something that is true whether you’re an abolitionist or a person who understandably views the ultimate penalty as a moral imperative for heinous acts against others. Pike received the humane option. In her case, it may result in “skin necrosis, permanent scarring, functional impairment, compartment syndrome, [and] chronic neuropathic pain” before the state perhaps comes to fetch her and do it all over again. One wonders how that is less barbaric.