The state of Tennessee has provided the final proof that state sponsored executions of human beings is a brutal, crude, and barbaric practice unworthy of a civilized society.  In Christa Pikes’ situation a person commits a horrible crime as a teenager, spends her life in isolation until the age of 50, and prepared to die, she experiences a failed execution. 

The 50 year old woman to be executed in this case was simply no longer the person she had been at 18 when the crime was committed.  Very few of us ever are the same person we were when we were so young.  So, in effect, the state was attempting to execute a proxy for the perpetrator of the crime much regretted.  Part of the difference for this woman was while she was in prison she was probably medicated for her bi-polar condition for the first time so she could experience reality in a way that was impossible for her as the out of control, terribly abused, untreated bipolar teenager.  She was sentenced to death as a teenager, put on death row after her trial only to be woken up to the brain space we all enjoy. Only for her, it was the first time in her life.  How hard is that to understand?  Not hard at all, but the thirst for the state’s vengeance overrode such clarity and the Supreme Court again fell back on beaurocratic nonsense.  The victim’s family waited all these years to see if execution would bring closure.  They lost all those years.  The perpetrator prepared herself for death, expressed her regrets and is likely now wondering, if she can wonder at all; what now? Still being alive might just be painfully shocking.  She lost.  The death row staff had to dance the macabre, injurious choreography of execution. They lost. Even the witnesses of the execution will carry those memories tatooed into their brains for the rest of their lives. They lost. Finally the state of Tennessee embarrassed themselves to no good end.  The state lost.

Urgent Proposal for Good

End the death penalty in the United States.  Execution for anything is above the pay grade of any human being.  Violence voyeurism is an illness we must step back from and heal as a nation if we want to rejoin the civilized world.  Yes, we must make the world safe from predators, but that can be done without the barbarism of the death penalty. We must suspend and end all executions and that would be good.