How legislatures and the courts sabotage the death penalty

State legislators and the courts have turned the death penalty into a grimly farcical process, feeding the cheapest arguments against it.

The attempted execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee showcases this fact. For full context, an 18-year-old Pike and an accomplice lured Colleen Slemmer into the woods, tortured her with a box cutter and a meat cleaver for about an hour, and then killed her by smashing her head with a chunk of asphalt. Pike kept a fragment of Slemmer’s skull as a trophy and bragged about it to other people. This was precisely the sort of depraved crime for which the death penalty was made.

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That crime took place in January 1995. In March 1996, Pike was sentenced to death. Yet, Pike’s execution was not allowed to take place for another 30 years, thanks to the quagmire of appeals meant to bog down the process. The Tennessee Supreme Court upheld her conviction and death sentence in 1998. She then applied for postconviction relief, had that application denied, had that denial upheld, petitioned for federal habeas relief, had that petition denied, had the Supreme Court decline to take up her challenge, filed another postconviction appeal, and filed a challenge to Tennessee’s lethal injection process.

That amounts to 30 years of appeals and legal hurdles that have delayed her execution. The legal chicanery continued all the way to her execution date, when a federal appeals court momentarily halted the execution an hour before it was scheduled to take place. According to the report, “The judges said they want to review whether her allegations of sexual abuse and rape as a child were fully considered before she was sentenced to death.” Apparently, that was impossible to review at any point in the past 30 years of delays and appeals.

Then, to make matters worse, Tennessee’s lethal injection method failed not once but twice, resulting in Pike being rushed to the hospital to receive, ironically and paradoxically, lifesaving care. The Tennessee legislature made lethal injection the primary method of execution in the state, but lethal injection has a botched execution rate of 7.2%, by far the highest among mainstream American execution methods. Gubernatorial candidate Marsha Blackburn rightly wants to return the state to the far more reliable method of electrocution, which has nearly the same total number of botched executions in the United States, despite executions by electrocution outnumbering those by lethal injection by a ratio of 4 to 1.

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This case will then be used to argue that the death penalty should be abolished. “It is more expensive than life imprisonment,” you will hear, even though it is only more expensive because of the seemingly never-ending appeals that drag the process out for decades. Botched lethal injections are supposed to be viewed as proof that the death penalty itself is cruel and torturous (as Pike’s attorney is now arguing), despite states choosing not to use (or courts forbidding them from using) more effective methods. You are even now seeing arguments that Pike should be allowed to walk free.

This legislative and judicial sabotage of the death penalty taints any debate about its merits, and it does so by denying justice to families like that of Slemmer, who have not been given the justice they were promised by the criminal justice system for 30 years and counting.