Calls grow to end the death penalty in the United States after the botched and “tortuous” execution of Christa Pike | Tennessee

Prominent lawyers, doctors and members of the religious community are calling for a moratorium on the death penalty in the United States after the failed attempted execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee left the prisoner alive but in critical condition and receiving life-saving medical care.

The recent spate of horribly botched executions in US death penalty states reached a new low Wednesday night when Tennessee Governor Bill Lee canceled the procedure after Pike was given two syringes full of pentobarbital. She is the only person to survive after receiving 5g of the sedative – a massive dose which, under normal circumstances, is considered fatal.

An hour after the first injection, eyewitnesses heard her still breathing, choking and struggling, and she was noted to have a racing heart. Her lawyers said her current condition and the degree to which she may have suffered brain damage from lack of oxygen were still unknown.

Sandra Babcock, a death penalty expert at Cornell Law School who advises Pike’s legal team, told the Guardian that the events that unfolded were “incredibly barbaric. They demand accountability.”

She added that at a minimum Lee must now “commute Christa Pike’s death sentence to life imprisonment.”

Another Pike attorney, Randy Spivey, present in the death chamber, called Pike’s ordeal “cruel and torturous.” He said he personally counted seven needles stuck in Pike’s left arm alone, “one of which appeared bent when it was removed.”

Pike, 50, was sentenced to death for the brutal 1995 murder of a teenage classmate, Colleen Slemmer. She was to be the first woman executed in Tennessee in over 200 years.

Prominent voices in favor of the death penalty in the United States told the Guardian that the failed execution was such a violation of the constitutional ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” that all judicial executions should be stopped. Bryan Stevenson, an internationally renowned death penalty lawyer and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, said there have been numerous warnings in recent months that U.S. executions are marred by irregularities and unreliability.

“Nearly a dozen botched executions in recent years should have halted executions well before now,” he said.

Stevenson said it was time to get around the preliminary question. Instead of asking whether a prisoner deserved to die for the crime committed, the question should be: “Do our governments that tolerate inequality, unreliability, and prejudice deserve to kill?”

He added: “Last night’s tragedy makes it clear that we must end the misguided policy of killing people to show that killing is wrong. »

Wednesday night marked the second time in five months that Tennessee had failed to carry out an execution. In May, Tony Carruthers survived the death chamber after the execution team failed to set up an IV line.

A new execution date has been set for next May.

This followed Alabama, which also failed to execute two death row inmates, Alan Miller and Kenneth Smith, after failing to find a vein. The spectacle of prisoners sent to their deaths, only to have their executions overturned due to fundamental failures in IV procedures, has sent death row states scrambling to find alternatives to lethal injections.

In turn, these alternative procedures have become bogged down in complications and disputes. Miller and Smith were ultimately killed by Alabama using an experimental procedure, nitrogen gas, that veterinarians banned as inhumane for the euthanasia of cats and dogs.

In June, a federal judge blocked the use of nitrogen in Alabama executions, ruling it was cruel and unusual punishment.

Other states have opted for the firing squad. But recent executions by firing squad have been disrupted by bullets missing the heart, so much so that some have suggested some of the poorly aimed shots may have been intentional.

Helen Prejean, a Catholic nun who is perhaps the best-known advocate for abolishing the death penalty in America after her book Dead Man Walking was made into the film of the same name, told the Guardian that Wednesday night’s events were the very definition of cruelty.

“This is the essence of cruelty. Take a conscious, imaginative human being, give her a date for her death, make her anticipate it over and over again, then take her out and try to kill her. She became helpless as they deliberately tried to kill her – what greater mental torture for a human being is there?”

Prejean added that she hoped the agony Pike endured “would be redemptive for others and help wake up the nation.”

As the number of botched and gruesome lethal injections rapidly increases, the central premise held by its proponents – that it is a humane, medicalized and scientific way to kill a person – has come under fire. Joel Zivot, a professor of anesthesiology in Atlanta, Georgia, who has reviewed hundreds of autopsies of people executed in the United States, said lethal injections would never merit the drug label.

“It’s an impersonation of a medical procedure. It’s a theft of a medical procedure. So when it goes wrong, it doesn’t surprise me at all.”

Zivot was asked to appear as an expert witness at a hearing called in August by a special master in the Pike case. He warned the senior judge that Pike suffered from a blood condition in which her blood platelets were elevated, making her vulnerable to blood clots.

Zivot told the hearing that Pike, as a petite woman who had been in solitary confinement on death row for nearly 30 years, likely had veins of poor quality, small caliber and hard to find. “I told them. I warned them,” he said.

The special master rejected almost all the evidence presented to him.

The last time the United States saw a moratorium on executions was in 1972, when the Supreme Court ruled in Furman v. Georgia that capital punishment was capricious and arbitrary in its execution. The ban was lifted four years later.

Paradoxically, calls for another nationwide pause are reaching a fever pitch just as pressure for executions is also reaching a fever pitch. Donald Trump has repeatedly urged death penalty states and the federal Justice Department to speed up judicial executions, and his orders are bearing fruit.

Last year saw the highest number of executions in the United States – 47 in 12 states – in 16 years.

Prejean said the answer to Trump and death penalty states’ growing determination to carry out executions was to bring the American people closer to the action. She highlighted Gallup’s findings on popular sentiment toward capital punishment.

In 1993, when his book came out, 80 percent of Americans supported the death penalty for convicted murderers. Today, that figure is 52%.

“It’s progress, but not enough. People have good hearts, but they are too far from the process which is secret and hidden. We need to bring this to the people, bring them into the execution chamber, so that they too become witnesses.”