Culture
Lessons From the Botched Tennessee Execution
Why is incompetence given such free rein in the American justice system?
TakiMag
“If it were done when ’tis done,” said Macbeth, “then ’twere well it were done quickly.”
He might have been speaking in criticism of the death penalty as it is applied in the United States. Christa Pike was to be executed 30 years after she was sentenced to death for a brutal murder in Tennessee: a longer delay than average, perhaps, but not by an order of magnitude. (The average is about 20 years on Death Row).
This is not a sign of the scrupulosity of the American legal system. It is a sign, rather, of its incompetence and moral corruption: and this is so whether or not you believe in the death penalty. If it takes all but a third of a century to be assured that such a penalty should be carried out, it should not be carried out. The practice of keeping prisoners on Death Row for such prolonged periods is a cruel and unusual punishment by any civilized standards, and it is worthy of the worst of corrupt tin-pot dictatorships.
But the lamentable failure to execute Christa Pike—not for lack of trying—would be funny if it were not so macabre. The greatest military power in the world, at least on paper, cannot kill expeditiously one 50-year-old-woman! I have heard of people waking up at their own post-mortems, but waking up after their own executions is something new.
It puts me in mind of two things. Among the minor treasures of my library is an original edition of the autobiography of a man called John Lee, who was known as “the man they could not hang.” Condemned to death in England for a murder he always said that he did not commit (and the evidence is far from conclusive that he did commit it), he survived three attempts to hang him. The medical officer present at the failed attempts—no execution could be carried out in the absence of a doctor or a man of God—stepped in to prevent further attempts. Lee was reprieved, and after he was released from prison, had a short career as a minor star of stage and screen.
The second thing of which the failed execution of Christa Pike put me in mind was my arrival as a stand-in doctor at a settlement in Africa. No sooner had I arrived than a white lady brought me her cat to put down. I forget now whether the cat was ill, or whether its owner had merely grown tired of it; but certainly I felt that I was being put to a test of sorts. Surely any competent doctor should be able to kill a cat?
I was unsure, however, of the best method. The intravenous route for drugs seemed closed to me: My lack of knowledge or experience of the anatomy of the cat’s vascular system did not permit it. Besides, I did not want to be scratched to pieces by a cat as I struggled to find a vein.
I opted for the intra-abdominal route, which turned out to be not very efficient, though in the end, after heroic doses, I succeeded in killing the cat. During this time, the lady looked on at me as if I were a total incompetent. So simple a procedure, and yet I made a meal of it! When, to my relief, the cat expired, I said to the lady that she could take it away now.
The very idea appalled her. What was she to do with it? It would be unhygienic to have it anywhere near her residence: Goodness knows what she might have caught from it! Therefore, I found myself in the situation on my arrival not only of a cat-killer, but of a public-health cat undertaker. The lady clearly regarded the disposal of the cat as my responsibility: After all, it was I who had killed it.
I forget now how I disposed of it, probably in some shallow grave. At any rate, no terrible epidemic followed.
But to return to executions by supposedly lethal injections, such as that of Christa Pike. Of course, it is possible that hers was undermined by a secret opponent of the death penalty who sabotaged it. On the other hand, it is also possible that good old-fashioned incompetence accounts for the failure, incompetence being a much-underestimated factor in human history. (There are many overall interpretations of history, such as the Hegelian, the Marxist, and the Whig; it is surely time for the incompetence theory of history.)
Private enterprise being so much more efficient than governmental enterprise (or lack of enterprise), surely the solution to botched executions lies in the private sector? There are no doubt private clinics, or at least non-governmental ones, that specialize in assisting death, and one never hears of any problems they have in putting down their—their what, exactly? Patients? Clients? Customers? At any rate, they should have no problems with the likes of Christa Pike. If such clinics raised any objections to executions, such as that they killed only the willing, the state could threaten them with the loss of their license if they refused to comply. After all, they will never be very numerous by comparison with the numbers of people they are already assisting to die.
I noticed something else about executions in America: Only 1 per cent of them are carried out on women. Is this not an insult to what used to be called, in the days before Gloria Steinem, the fair sex? Surely women should be treated equally with men?
If it is objected, as no doubt inegalitarians will object, that women commit only one-ninth as many homicides as men, there are two possible answers. The first is that women should be encouraged to carry out more homicides to make them as homicidal as men, and therefore to be equally susceptible to the death penalty.
But even without this encouragement, it is surely possible to bring up the rate of the execution of women to that of men? After all, 11 per cent of homicides is a much higher proportion than is 1 per cent of executions.
It is surely high time that this anomalous inequality be addressed and eliminated.
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