After another botched execution, is it time to reconsider the death penalty?

One purpose of the death penalty is to offer closure — for survivors, victims and the justice system. It has not worked out that way in the case of Christa Pike. Tennessee’s failed attempt to execute Pike for a 1995 murder is raising fresh questions about the morality and viability of the practice.

‘Things can go grotesquely wrong’

Pike’s case shows the death penalty is a “moral stain on America,” said Rex Huppke at USA Today. She is just the latest U.S. prisoner to survive an execution, said the Death Penalty Information Center. Tennessee tried and failed in May to kill Tony Carruthers for his conviction on a 1996 triple murder, and Alabama and Idaho have seen similar missteps since 2022. Executions are “messy,” Huppke said, and “things can go grotesquely wrong.”

It is a “scandal” that Pike’s execution was botched, said Charles C.W. Cooke at National Review. But she “should be dead” for her part in the grisly murder of Colleen Slemmer. The execution’s failure is the fault of those who have tried to “medicalize” state-sanctioned killing through the lethal injection process. Most death penalty advocates would “happily replace lethal injections with a firing squad or a gallows.”

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Tennessee has proven itself “embarrassingly bad” at the death penalty, said Betsy Phillips at the Nashville Scene. The failed executions are “not justice” or “even revenge.” They are just “stupid and cruel, and there’s no honor in that.”

‘Watershed moment’?

Botched executions “make headlines,” but the latest will probably not be a “watershed moment” for the death penalty, said Austin Sarat at The Boston Globe. Tennessee leaders are already calling to restart executions, “if not by lethal injection then by other means.”

President Donald Trump this week “approved the execution by firing squad” of Nidal Hasan for a 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, said NPR. Polls, however, show that support for the death penalty has declined in recent decades. Capital punishment was already “dying its own slow death” before the Pike case, Corinna Lain of the University of Richmond School of Law said to the outlet.