While Christa Pike clings to life in a Nashville hospital, some Tennessee politicians have rushed to display their tough-on-crime credentials and how heartless they are. Instead of demonstrating the restraint and judiciousness that leadership demands, they seem eager to stir up public emotion at an incredibly difficult moment, a moment when people across the nation are askingwhat is wrong with Tennessee that it would treat anyone in the callous way it treated Christa Pike
.As Pike’s lawyers told The New York Times, “Hospital staff are working to save Ms. Pike’s life and to clear the pentobarbital from her system… [W]e are working closely with those closest to Christa to respect her wishes, safeguard her privacy and protect her rights as a patient
during this extraordinarily difficult time.”
Meanwhile, U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn’sresponse: No sympathy for Pike.
Blackburn took the occasion of this human tragedy to call for Tennessee to bring back the electric chair.
Sorry, Senator. Trotting out this once-popular but now discredited execution technology, is no solution to Tennessee’s death penalty problems.
Tennessee's death penalty system is failing
Havingbotched the execution of Tony Carruthers five months ago, Tennessee is competing to lead the country in execution incompetence. It is time for the Volunteer State to give up on its efforts to keep its broken machinery of death running and join other states on the road to abolishing capital punishment.
On Oct. 1, one day after the debacle that unfolded in Tennessee’s execution chamber, Blackburn, now the Republican candidate for governor, posted the following on X. “This situation is tragic. Christa Pike should have been executed long ago. Now, this botched process is extending the pain for the family of Colleen Slemmer.”
“While there should be a thorough review of what happened and why the process failed, the answer is simple: bring back the electric chair and deliver justice for these victims swiftly. As your governor, I will do just that.”
Not surprisingly, this statement carried the X handle, @VoteMarsha.
A day later, Blackburntold The New York Times “that she would try again to execute Ms. Pike … The family of the classmate, Colleen Slemmer, deserves ‘swift justice.’”
The senator seemed not to care that a second trip to the execution chamber would be a form of double jeopardy and therefore unconstitutional. She seemed not to care that under Supreme Court precedent, another execution attempt is only allowed when the failure of the first was an “unforeseeable accident” and that because the state had plenty of warning about the risks of trying to execute Christa Pike by lethal injection what unfolded on Wednesday night was entirely foreseeable.
With political points to be made, Blackburn won’t let such constitutional niceties stand in the way.
Cruelty is not leadership
Is that the kind of leader the people of Tennessee want in their next governor?
And even if it were not unconstitutional, Blackburn’s eagerness to carry out a second execution seems bloodthirsty and cruel. While she is right to express concern for the family of Colleen Slemmer, her obligations as a leader are to all the people of Tennessee.
Unfortunately, Blackburn was not alone in failing to give them the kind of leadership they deserve. Republican Rep. Tim Burchett told an interviewer on NewsNation that what mattered most to him was that Pike committed a “horrible crime.”
When the interviewer reminded him that “the government has a responsibility to carry out…executions in a professional manner,” Burchett one-upped Blackburn by saying he had introduced legislation to “bring back hanging.”
“We have bent over backward for these criminals.” Burchett argued that if Pike recovers, the state should “prop her up and bring her to a firing squad.”
Then, in a moment that echoed what the last words said by the notorious killer Gary Gilmore before he was executed by a firing squad in 1977, Burchett displayed his own enthusiasm for that execution method when he said simply, “Let’s do it.”
Burchett seemed untroubled by the sheer brutality of the firing squad, just as Blackburn is untroubled by the prospect of bringing back an execution technology that sometimes resulted in people catching on fire while they were being electrocuted.
What punishment says about us
More than 100 years ago, the famous social psychologist George Herbert Mead sought to explain why people would tolerate such things. He wrote that when confronted by horrible crimes, we can be overtaken by what he called primitive, hostile instincts that assert themselves in their “native ruthlessness.”
Driven by such instincts, no amount of suffering will truly satisfy “those who feel themselves aggrieved” by what a criminal has done. We regard every criminal as an “enemy to the society to which we belong. In this attitude, we are defending the social structure against an enemy with all the animus which the threat to our own interests calls out.”
Mead hoped to help us begin to tame that animus and remind us that the way a society punishes tells us as much about who we are and whom we want to be as it does about the criminals we make suffer.
While it is up to the people of Tennessee to decide for themselves whether the way Blackburn and Burchett reacted to Pike’s botched execution and her current condition helps them be who they are and want to be, I hope that they will demand more from those who purport to represent them than those people have shown so far.
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Tenn. deserves better than cruelty disguised as leadership | Opinion
