Media365
It is hard to find a more surreal turn of events than what befell Christa Pike in Tennessee. The state prepared to execute her and gave her two doses of pentobarbital, but she survived. She was then taken from the prison to a hospital by ambulance, where doctors immediately began working to preserve her life, contrary to the state’s recent actions. Pike’s attorneys stated that medical personnel were attempting to remove the drug from her body. The woman found guilty of the horrific 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer was reported to be unconscious, critically ill, and on a ventilator.
This represents a troubling confrontation between the two sides of the contemporary state. In one place, authorities apply chemicals intended to cause death, whereas in another, medical professionals employ their expertise and technology to preserve that same life. If Pike recovers, an even stranger question emerges: Can the state then prepare to execute someone its medical system has just fought to save?
To make this an issue of sympathy for Pike would miss the point. Her crime was appalling. No serious discussion of capital punishment should diminish Colleen Slemmer’s suffering or disregard the claims of victims and their families. The moral challenge of the death penalty stems exactly from the fact that the crimes are often so horrific. The question, however, is: What can a constitutional state do once guilt is confirmed?
American law has faced this dilemma before, if not under these circumstances. Willie Francis survived an attempt to execute him in the electric chair by the state of Louisiana, because there was a malfunction of equipment in 1946. The US Supreme Court in Francis vs Resweber (1947) held that a botched execution was accidental and not a separate punishment, thus permitting a second attempt. However, Justice Felix Frankfurter added a crucial caveat: “A series of abortive attempts” might create what he called an altogether different constitutional problem.
That warning deserves renewed attention. However, the question is not simply whether Tennessee could still go forward and put Pike to death. By this I mean: If a life is extinguished multiple times, does that change the very nature of what punishment means?
A court has the authority to impose the death penalty. The state does not automatically gain an unlimited licence to keep trying to cause death until it succeeds. Punishment involves not only its intended outcome but also the actual suffering imposed on the condemned person. Expose someone to the fear of death, invasive treatments, deadly chemicals, severe medical outcomes, and emergency care, then force her to endure the whole ordeal again, and the experience takes on a different character from the initial punishment declared. Now that the condemned has reached death’s door and been gravely injured again, what purpose does it serve to bring her there a second time? One might ask: When does administering justice become a demand for a deed to be performed?
Foucault identified another paradox. Discipline and Punish laid out how punishment moved away from the public spectacle of bodily suffering — it became bureaucratic, regulated, and increasingly invisible. The transformation could end in a lethal injection: Sovereign violence erased once more, disguised as clinical peace delivered through limp plastic tubing. Pike’s survival shreds that clean, polished facade.
That also hints at the more profound contradiction of contemporary capital punishment. Lethal injection owes its acceptance, in part, to medicalisation. A prisoner is positioned on what appears to be a hospital gurney. Death looks like the evisceration of a grotesque tumour. However, medicine and execution have utterly opposite moral foundations. Medicine interposes itself to preserve life or ease suffering, while execution is an intervention that can only remove a life.
The Pike case also unsettles the reassuring language of “humane” or “painless” executions. The US Supreme Court ruled that the Eighth Amendment does not ensure a painless death. To put it another way, prisoners face a tough standard when contesting execution protocols. Nevertheless, Pike’s situation is not just about faulty needles or incorrect dosing. The question is whether any institution deliberately created to kill can genuinely attain the moral standing of a routine medical procedure.
By the close of 2025, 113 countries had completely abolished capital punishment for all offences. In contrast, the US carried out 47 executions that year, marking its highest yearly total since 2009. In a nutshell, wherever it is found in constitutional democracies, the continued use of capital punishment is becoming increasingly unusual. The reason the state holds a monopoly on legitimate violence is to substitute personal revenge for impartial justice. Yet, by intentionally ending that life, the state risks mirroring that inflexibility, preventing any chance for remorse, restoration, or remedy.
As you read this, Tennessee faces the question of whether to pursue Pike’s execution again. In the end, the law will probably permit this. Nonetheless, legality is not the only form of justice. Surely, there comes a time when even the constitutional state, having attempted and failed to end human life lawfully, acknowledges the boundaries of its authority, as sovereignty can also be demonstrated through restraint — the ability not only to wield its immense power but also to understand when and how to stop.
The writer is professor, Jadavpur University
