Christa Pike's botched execution is a moral stain on America | Opinion - USA Today

I understand the shock over the botched execution of convicted murderer Christa Pike in Tennessee. She survived what should have been a lethal dose of pentobarbital, her lawyer confirmed on Oct. 1, complained of pain and could still be heard snoring as witnesses were rushed away from the execution chamber. She wound up in a hospital late on Sept. 30.

On Oct. 1, Gov. Bill Lee called it “deeply disturbing” and said: "This is a tragedy. There is no one that wanted what happened last night to happen. It shouldn't have happened.”

Calling it deeply disturbing is a vast understatement, and saying “it shouldn’t have happened” is spot-on, though certainly not in the way Lee meant it. 

Simply put, state and federal governments should not be in the business of killing people. Killing is messy, and things can go grotesquely wrong, as they did in Pike’s case.

More important, though, killing is wrong. (I shouldn’t even have to type those words.) And the state deciding who among convicted criminals lives and who dies is morally obtuse.

On the morning of June 11, 2001, I was an Associated Press media witness to the federal execution of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. I had volunteered to cover the execution in part because I wasn’t sure how I felt about the death penalty, and there was arguably no better candidate for such a thing than McVeigh, who blew up a federal building in 1995, killing 168 people, including 19 children.

In my gut, I believed he deserved to die. If not him, then who? There was certainly no universe in which I’d mourn a mass murderer. 

The federal execution chamber in Terre Haute, Indiana, was small. We media witnesses, once the curtains were pulled, were behind a pane of glass just inches from McVeigh’s feet. He was fastened to a gurney, awaiting the multistep lethal injection process.

The setting was sterile, like a hospital room. Everything ran on time, with precision. First, his eyes closed as the initial drug sedated him. But then the almost mechanized formality of what was happening changed.

McVeigh’s breathing slowed, and we could tell he was dying. He made a few light gasps for air. It wasn’t gruesome at all, but in my mind, everything changed. The warden was standing next to a man who was dying, a man who was being killed right in front of me. And the warden was doing nothing. Just standing to the side.

As human beings, we react to people in pain. We respond reflexively. To see that not happening, to see that fundamental instinct inhibited, was jarring. It felt wrong, even though the subject was a monster. It wasn’t the person on the gurney who mattered to me, it was what the people around him were doing, or not doing.

For all the pain McVeigh unleashed on this world, there’s no part of me that’s sad he’s dead. But the fact that it was our government that killed him has never left me.

About a week later, I witnessed another federal execution, a drug kingpin named Juan Raul Garza. He was a convicted murderer who had also ordered the killing of other people. 

But one of the differences between him and McVeigh was that Garza's legal team could point to, as I reported at the time, “26 cases involving crimes similar to Garza's where prosecutors did not seek the federal death penalty.”

So the issue of how fairly the death penalty is administered was glaring. But the government killed Garza on the same gurney where officials killed McVeigh eight days earlier.

Gregory Wiercioch, one of Garza’s attorneys, said after the execution: “Some day this precise savagery will end, but not today.”

It still hasn’t ended. There is no evidence the death penalty acts as a deterrent, yet there have already been 29 prisoners executed in the United States since January.

We still haven’t reckoned with the fact that not wanting our government to kill criminals isn’t the same as wanting a murderer to live. The murderer is the one who did wrong, so what good comes from us doing wrong as well?

I hope the horror of what happened to Pike at our hands shifts some thinking on the morality of the death penalty.

For me, it just solidifies the beliefs I’ve carried since watching our government kill two men in quick succession: The death penalty shouldn’t exist. It fixes nothing. And slowly, surely and inevitably, it erodes our souls.

Follow USA TODAY columnist Rex Huppke on Bluesky at @rexhuppke.bsky.social and on Facebook at facebook.com/RexIsAJerk.