I was chatting with one of my cousins the other day about the botched execution of Krista Pike, and her miraculous recovery from it, with apparently no brain damage. I speculated (and I am skeptical about an afterlife) that perhaps she had actually died and gone to hell, and that a demon had come up to possess her body in her place. My cousin thought that would make an excellent plot for a horror movie.
I will put that flippancy aside. Krista Pike is a particularly evil person – if she did indeed die and have her body possessed by a demon in her place, I doubt anyone could tell the difference. Aside from the horrific way she murdered her classmate as a teenager, she later on had an opportunity to strangle another death row inmate – for which she is serving an additional 25 years for attempted murder. She is not one of those death row reform stories where we are dealing with someone who is penitent and a genuinely changed person, like some of those people for whom some advocates might elicit sympathy and call for clemency.
The best place for Krista Pike is to be locked up for life, where she has less opportunity (but obviously not zero opportunity) to harm anyone else.
But is it appropriate for the state to seek to kill someone like that, even someone who is clearly so monstrous as Krista Pike? And is attempting to execute someone in a way which is clearly painful and with a genuine chance of failing truly just?
Full disclosure: I am opposed to the death penalty. I did not always oppose it. In my early adulthood I would have supported it enthusiastically if it came up for discussion, and until about a decade ago, I was ambiguous about it. My position now is that some people may deserve death for their horrendous actions, but they should instead spend the rest of their natural lives locked up and forced to reflect on what they have done and the lives they destroyed, in the hope that perhaps they might find some realisation and repentance.
Krista Pike is one of two executions which are subject to intense scrutiny at the moment. The other is the imminent execution by firing squad of Nidal Hassan, the Fort Hood shooter. The US government originally intended to make this execution public through live streaming.
International outrage at this suggestion has caused the US government to reverse its position on the live streaming.
In a twisted way, I am disappointed that the US government is not going to live stream the execution after all. This is not because I have some ghoulish desire to watch this mass murderer torn apart by bullets from the comfort of my iPad. It is because showing the brutal reality of state sponsored violence in the form of public execution is something which will make most sane people extremely uncomfortable, and hopefully make them think more seriously about what capital punishment actually is, and whether it is something which a civilised modern society should still countenance.
The botched execution of Krista Pike was not broadcast, and I am unsure as to whether a video recording of it even exists. If it does, it should be available for people to see, so that they can reflect on the reality of what was attempted and failed. As it stands, the news commentaries on how the execution proceeded alone are enough to cause revulsion.
The USA is a very different place from the rest of the Western World. The excessive religiosity (a mutated form of protestantism different from the muted Christianity the rest of us nominally follow) and the obsession with gun ownership are matters that I find quite disturbing and to some degree bewildering. The commitment to capital punishment is, if anything, a symptom of this difference that is even more disturbing than the love of God and Guns.
Public executions were, for the most part, abandoned in Europe before the Second World War. Capital punishment itself faded out in the post war era. The last execution in Australia was the hanging of Ronald Ryan in 1967, two years before my birth.
America sometimes seems to be fifty or more years behind the rest of the Western World. The continued survival of capital punishment well into the 21st Century is one of the most visible signs of this lag.
I would hope that the public attention on the executions of Krista Pike and Nidal Hassan cause Americans to reflect on what the State, as the proxy for its citizenry, is empowered to do, and whether this is the image and reality that they, as a society, wish to represent themselves.
If anything good can come of this, and I do not see the intentional killing of any human being, however evil that person may be, as a good thing, then it would be that it causes opinion in the USA to finally turn against the continuance of capital punishment and bring it to an end.
