Andrew Phillips: Tennessee’s death penalty travesty was decades in the making - Toronto Star
The biggest problem with Christa Pike’s story isn’t that Tennessee screwed up her execution. It’s everything that led up to this week’s horror.
Christa Pike of Tennessee survived two lethal injection doses and was hospitalized early Thursday morning. Hours earlier on Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for Pike, 50, to become the first woman to be executed in Tennessee in 200 years.
Andrew Phillips is a Toronto-based staff columnist for the Star’s Opinion page. Reach him via email: aphillips@thestar.ca
The death penalty is horrendous under almost any circumstances, but the botched execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee this week was particularly repellent.
As you may have heard, executioners injected Pike not once, but twice, with a drug called pentobarbital. One dose is supposed to do the trick in executions by lethal injection, but it didn’t work so they tried again.
Even after that, Pike was still alive, though unconscious and snoring. Two attempts to kill someone is all the law allows for in Tennessee so the state’s governor had no choice but to halt the whole process.
Now Pike is in hospital and it’s an open question whether she’ll recover. Some experts think the poison injected into her system caused brain damage so it’s possible she’ll live on but in a vegetative state. As of Thursday, no one seems to know.
In this photo taken from television, Canadian Stanley Faulder is shown in a television interview from death row in Huntsville Texas. He was later executed by lethal injection.
For me, reading about the travesty in Tennessee took me back to my own brush with the death penalty, or at least with someone facing that sentence.
Back in November of 1998 I journeyed to Huntsville, Texas, to look into the case of Stanley Faulder, a Canadian facing execution by lethal injection for murdering a woman 23 years earlier.
It was a brutal crime, and though Faulder’s lawyers raised many doubts about the case against him a jury found him guilty and, Texas being Texas, sentenced him to die. Evidence he had suffered a serious brain injury as a child that resulted in occasional violent outbursts didn’t sway the Texans, either.
I managed to wrangle an interview with Faulder on death row. What struck me most was how gentle, even humble, he seemed by then. It was impossible to square the soft-spoken man I met with the violent crime committed a quarter of a century before.
After so long, it felt as though Texas was planning to execute a very different person — a broken, 61-year-old man far removed from the impulsive, violent person he had been decades before. Aside from simply taking vengeance — an eye for an eye and all that — what was the point of killing him at that point? (He was executed a few months later.)
Media witnesses recount the moments before the execution of Christa Pike was halted on Wednesday in Nashville, Tenn.
This is even more relevant in the case of Christa Pike. Her bungled execution was hideous, but the horror story began years before she brutally murdered a classmate, Colleen Slemmer, in 1995. She admits to committing the crime along with two other teens, including a boyfriend who was 17 and thus ineligible for the death penalty.
Pike herself was 18, so just over the age at which someone can be sentenced to death in Tennessee. By then, according to evidence brought out by her legal team, she had already suffered years of physical and sexual abuse.
She’d been raped multiple times, first at age 11, and beaten by her father and other family members. She suffered from fetal alcohol poisoning that damaged her brain. She’d been diagnosed as bipolar and suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of what one of the doctors who examined her called an “almost unbearably abusive background.”
None of that made a difference at her trial. In 1996 she was sentenced to die — the youngest woman to receive the death penalty in the U.S. in the modern era, and the first woman to be scheduled for execution in Tennessee since 1819.
Pike spent the next 31 years on death row and is now 50. She never denied committing the murder and accepted that she would never be freed. “If I could take it all back, I would,” she said at one point. “I’m not even close to being the same person I was over 25 years ago.”
That’s the thing: even if you think murder demands the death penalty, and even if you think hideous abuse and mental illness is no mitigating factor, the fact is you’re not really punishing the same person after 30-plus years. That was true in the case of Stan Faulder; it seems even truer for Christa Pike.
If there’s anything positive to come out of this, it’s that Tennessee has been forced to look at how it kills those whom it decides deserve the ultimate punishment. The state had another botched execution earlier this year and Gov. Bill Lee has suspended all executions for the time being.
But the biggest problem with Christa Pike’s story isn’t that Tennessee screwed up her execution. It’s everything that led up to this week’s horror. And there’s no sign that will be fixed any time soon.
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Opinion articles are based on the author’s interpretations and judgments of facts, data and events. More details
Andrew Phillips is a Toronto-based staff columnist for the Star’s Opinion page. Reach him via email: aphillips@thestar.ca
