The Cruel Stupidity of Lethal Injection

I hate the death penalty. I hate it on the visceral level of being outraged that the state can take a person’s life. I really hate that we know innocent people have been executed, and that still doesn’t stop the state from clamoring for more people to kill. But I also hate how long it takes and how cruel that is to the victims’ families. I hate that it isn’t a deterrence. I hate how politicians use it to prove they’re tough on crime.

I thought I hated it in all the ways there are to hate it. But now I also hate it because it’s embarrassing how bad Tennessee is at the death penalty. I know I don’t need to rehash this for you. The state tried to execute Christa Pike last week, and for the second time this year, it failed to execute a condemned prisoner.

Christa Pike Transported to Hospital Following Two Failed Lethal Injection Attempts

An appeals court stayed Pike's execution Wednesday morning, but the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated it; the failed lethal injection is the TDOC’s second this year

It’s humiliating to live in a state where in 2024 (the last year tallied on the state’s website), 2,499 people overdosed on drugs and died. Twenty-five-hundred people can kill themselves by overdose, and the state can’t kill two people with drugs?

The most embarrassing part is that these people are in a prison. They are surrounded by people who are experts in procuring drugs, administering drugs; there are people there who are also experts in killing people. And yet the Tennessee Department of Correction kept operating under the authority of a guy who oversaw botched executions in Arizona. 

How much were we paying these hucksters to fail to execute people? The most a Tennessee state prisoner can earn is 59 cents an hour. I’m no fiscal conservative, but paying someone who knows how to murder people (because they’re in prison for murder) 59 cents an hour has to be an infinitely better financial deal than paying the salaries of the people who created this mess.

Everything about the death penalty is gross. But the situation we’re currently in — in which the state is procuring drugs off the "gray market" and having a doctor willing to violate the Hippocratic Oath by administering these drugs to kill someone, and in which we violate the prisoner’s constitutional rights and administer a punishment so unusual that we can’t predict what’s going to happen when it is administered, and call that upholding the law — is so damn ... I don’t know, priggish?

State Correction Department Leader Resigns After Botched Execution

Frank Strada steps down after failed lethal injection of Christa Pike; Gov. Lee to appoint interim leader

Maybe priggish isn’t the right word. But the state has already decided to push the boundaries of the law, and they don’t care that the doctor they’re using is violating his profession’s ethical norms. So why are we trying to procure the drugs through some semi-legitimate process? Why involve a doctor at all? You’re already doing this the wrong way. What does holding onto the right protocol get you?

The state is basically telling on itself that the death penalty is symbolic. That the importance isn’t whether the prisoner dies or if the law was followed — it’s if the ritual was completed. That’s why we still use a doctor, even when the doctor sucks — the ritual calls for it. It’s tradition. We have to go to great lengths to procure the drugs to kill the inmate instead of just using any of the easily procurable, widely available street drugs that would do the job, because the arduousness of the procurement process shows that the state is being diligent and careful and following the right steps. We can’t even switch to a form of execution that works better, because this is what the ritual needs.

This way we can all see that killing someone is only right when it is warranted, laborious and incredibly medicalized. Bad people commit bad killings when they shoot someone from a car. Or when they get really mad and stab someone. Or when they torture someone to death. It’s not the killing that’s the problem. It’s the chaos of it.

But as a state, we’ve made the ritual around the execution so important that we can’t use methods that work. That’s not justice. That’s not even revenge. It’s just us being stupid and cruel, and there’s no honor in that.