Capital punishment as macabre theatre

There was already enough to write about the question of capital punishment when the State of Tennessee attempted to execute Christa Pike.

Pike would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years, but her execution on Sept. 30 did not go as planned — she survived, despite two lethal injections of pentobarbital, and was taken to hospital in critical condition.

Pike was released from hospital and sent back to the same prison where she has been incarcerated for the last 30 years, ever since she was convicted — as an 18-year-old — of the murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in 1995.

Pike faces a long recovery, and an uncertain one. Tennessee assistant attorney general Will Ayers has not said if the state will attempt to execute Pike again, but Gov. Bill Lee has halted all executions this year and ordered an independent review of what went wrong.

Botched executions — something that the Death Penalty Information Center says happened in more than one-third of U.S. execution attempts in 2022 — clearly raise another issue about the process.

Simply put, even if you can accept that putting someone to death is just punishment for some crimes — something many question, in part because the justice system is imperfect and has, with fair frequency, convicted the innocent — you have to be able to accept that such punishment should not include elements of torture, such as methods of execution that unduly prolong suffering or leave an inmate alive but harmed.

If society decides to take a life of an adjudged criminal, that punishment should be administered in a humane way with the least amount of suffering.

If the Pike case didn’t raise a question in your mind about capital punishment, the Trump administration briefly decided to raise the stakes in the upcoming execution of a mass murderer who attacked an American military base.

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan launched an attack at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009, killing 13 people and injuring 32. He’s scheduled to be killed by firing squad in December.

As though a firing squad execution doesn’t seem horrific enough, both U.S. Secretary of Defence Peter Hegseth and President Donald Trump had signalled they were considering having the execution livestreamed, with Hegseth calling a public execution a “no-brainer.”

Hegseth told far-right influencer Jack Posobiec that the last execution by firing squad in the U.S. military occurred during the Second World War.

“Well, I kind of like the mentality we had (then), which was win,” he added.

Wow.

Trump decided Thursday the livestream would not happen.

There had been plenty of pushback, with Archbishop Paul S. Coakley, leader of Roman Catholic bishops in the U.S., calling the suggestion “a barbaric promotion of a culture of death (which) must be reconsidered.”

Leave aside that Hasan was seeking martyrdom in his attack on the base — something the broadcast execution of a now-paraplegic man in a wheelchair would almost certainly grant him some version of — and stop to think about what Hegseth and Trump were proposing.

They had seriously considered turning punishment into international spectacle, one which even the most despotic nations in the world refrain from doing.

Who believes they rightfully hold the keys to the life and death of others in their own hands? And who believes they should broadcast death on the internet, as if it were just another contest for a business apprenticeship?

Think about this — if Hasan’s execution broadcast had gone ahead, would we have heard Donald Trump crowing about “the highest ratings ever”?

Somehow, given the broad and deep coarsening of the shining city upon the hill that was once America, it’s hard not to believe we just might have.