Calls grow for US death penalty halt after ‘torturous’ botched execution of Christa Pike

Top lawyers, doctors and members of the faith community are calling for a moratorium on the US death penalty after Tennessee’s failed attempt to execute Christa Pike left the prisoner alive but in critical condition and receiving life-saving medical care.The recent spate of harrowingly botched executions across US death penalty states reached a new low late on Wednesday when Tennessee’s governor Bill Lee called off the procedure after Pike had been injected with two full syringes of pentobarbital. She is the only person to have survived being administered 5mg of the sedative – a massive dose that under normal circumstances is considered fatal.An hour after the first injection was given, she was overheard by eyewitnesses to be still breathing, choking and struggling, and was found to have a heartbeat. Her lawyers said that her current condition, and the degree to which she may have been brain damaged through oxygen deprivation, were as yet unknown.Sandra Babcock, a death penalty scholar at Cornell law school who advises Pike’s legal team, told the Guardian that the events that unfolded were “unimaginably barbaric. They demand accountability.”She added that at a minimum Lee must now “commute Christa Pike’s death sentence to life imprisonment”.Another of Pike’s lawyers, Randy Spivey, who was present in the death chamber, called Pike’s ordeal “cruel and torturous”. He said he had personally counted seven needles stuck in Pike’s left arm alone, “one of which appeared to be bent when it was pulled from her”.Pike, 50, was sentenced to death for the brutal 1995 killing of a teenage classmate, Colleen Slemmer. She was set to be the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.Leading voices on the death penalty in America told the Guardian that the failed execution was such a violation of the constitutional prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishment” that all judicial killings had to be halted. Bryan Stevenson, an internationally renowned death penalty lawyer and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, said that many warnings had been made in recent months that US executions were flawed and unreliable.“Nearly a dozen botched executions in recent years should have suspended executions long before now,” he said.Stevenson said it was time to turn around the threshold question. Instead of asking whether a prisoner deserved to die for the crime committed, the question should be: “Do our governments which tolerate inequality, unreliability and bias deserve to kill?”He added: “Last night’s tragedy makes clear we should stop the misguided policy of killing people to show that killing is wrong.”Wednesday night was the second time in five months that Tennessee had failed an execution. In May, Tony Carruthers survived the death chamber after the execution team were unable to set up an IV line.He has been given a new execution date for next May.That followed Alabama, which also failed to execute two death row prisoners, Alan Miller and Kenneth Smith, having been unable to find a vein. The spectacle of prisoners being sent to their deaths, only to have the executions called off as a result of basic failures in IV procedures, has sent death penalty states scrambling to find alternatives to lethal injections.In turn, those alternative procedures have become mired in complications and disputes. Miller and Smith were both eventually killed by Alabama using an experimental procedure, nitrogen gas, that veterinarians have banned as inhumane for the euthanasia of cats and dogs.In June, a federal judge blocked Alabama’s use of nitrogen in executions, ruling it cruel and unusual punishment.Other states have opted for the firing squad. But recent firing squad executions have been troubled by bullets missing the heart, to the extent that the suggestion has been raised that some of the mis-targeted shots might have been intentional.Helen Prejean, a Catholic nun who is perhaps the best-known advocate for abolition of the death penalty in America after her book Dead Man Walking was turned into a film of the same name, told the Guardian that the events on Wednesday night were the definition of cruelty.“This is the essence of cruelty. Take a conscious, imaginative human being, give her a date for her death, have her anticipate it over and over again, and then take her out and try and kill her. She was rendered defenceless as they deliberately attempted to kill her – what greater mental torture for a human being is there?”Prejean added that she hoped the agony Pike had endured “would be redemptive for others, and help to wake up the nation”.As the number of gruesome botched lethal injections rapidly mounts, the central premise that has been held up by supporters – that it is a humane, medicalised 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 executed people in the US, said that lethal injections would never deserve the label of medicine.“This is the impersonation of a medical act. It is the theft of a medical act. So when it goes awry, that is not at all surprising to me.”Zivot was invited to present as an expert witness at a hearing convened in August by a special master in the Pike case. He warned the senior judge that Pike had a blood condition in which her blood platelets were elevated that rendered her vulnerable to blood clots.Zivot told the hearing that Pike, as a small woman who had been in solitary confinement on death row for almost 30 years, likely had veins that were of poor quality, small in 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 that the US 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 rendition. The ban was lifted four years later.Paradoxically, calls for a renewed nationwide pause are reaching fever pitch at precisely the time that pressure to carry out executions is also peaking. Donald Trump has repeatedly exhorted death penalty states and the federal Department of Justice to speed up judicial killings, and his orders are having an effect.Last year saw the highest number of US executions – 47 across 12 states – in 16 years.Prejean said that the answer to the growing determination of Trump and the death penalty states to carry out executions was to bring the American people closer to the action. She pointed to Gallup’s findings tracking popular sentiment towards capital punishment.In 1993, when her book came out, 80% of Americans supported the death penalty for convicted murderers. Now that figure is 52%.“That’s progress, though not enough. People have good hearts, but they are too removed from the process that is secret and hidden. We have got to bring this to the people, bring them into the execution chamber, so that they too become a witness.”