Christa Pike is awake and has started walking and talking after a failed execution, according to her legal team. You probably already knew that, because just about every news outlet in the United States is charting her stunning recovery from a double dose of pentobarbital minute by minute. Just last week, the state of Tennessee felt this 50-year-old woman, who has spent almost her entire adult life sitting on death row for a crime she committed in the last millennium, deserved to be pumped with poison until she was dead.
Now, many of us are seemingly more attentive to her health and well-being than our own. When it comes to capital punishment, America can’t stop contradicting itself. Around 7:30 p.m. on September 30, Pike, convicted of the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, was strapped to the execution table at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville and received a supposedly lethal dose of pentobarbital.
When that failed to kill her, executioners gave her another round. After two doses, she was unconscious, but certainly not dead. Witnesses said Pike was audibly snoring and was clearly still breathing when they were ushered out of the viewing area.
Before long, the objective of killing Pike was superseded by the urgent need to keep her alive. She was rushed to a hospital and placed on a ventilator, with doctors managing to avert her death. One might ask why, if it were so necessary for this person to die, was her execution halted to pull her back from the brink?
The same legal system that authorized her execution entitles her to medical care when the execution fails. Deliberate indifference to prisoners' serious medical needs violates the Constitution, and Tennessee had already carried out the maximum number of lethal injections—one dose, plus a backup—permitted under its execution protocol. Allowing Pike to lie on the table and suffer in the hope she would eventually expire could be considered exactly the kind of "cruel and unusual punishment" that the Eighth Amendment is designed to prevent.
Lethal injection was tabled as a more humane method of execution. It only looks humane because it’s clinical. The condemned almost looks like a patient, lying in a hospital bed, before falling asleep.
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