I live in a state that tried to kill Christa Pike twice, and still her execution failed. We were at cousin Peg’s house for dinner Saturday night when the Groom told us she was discharged from Vanderbilt. I know enough not to ask him about his patients, but I also know he’s been doing research and not attending in the MICU. Still this was public knowledge; Pike was awake and aware, and able to walk on her own after two ‘supposed’ injections of pentobarbital. Bob thinks they either missed her vein or blew a vein or both.
How is it that a veterinarian could come to my house and peacefully put my poor, old ailing dog Buddha to sleep without a hitch years ago, but the state of TN could so spectacularly botch an execution thirty years in the making?
The death penalty is nothing new. As far back as 18th Century BC, King Hammurabi of Babylon codified the death penalty for twenty five different crimes. Strangely enough, murder wasn’t one of them! But the first record of a public execution was in 16th Century BC Egypt where “…the wrongdoer, a member of nobility, was accused of magic, and ordered to take his own life. During this period non-nobility was usually killed with an ax.” Our country had its own reasons for capital punishment from the very beginning, including sodomy, slave stealing, kidnapping, perjury and treason. And we all remember Salem, MA where practicing magic was a burnable offense. Mostly before the electric chair, the states chose hanging.
“Finally, in 1846, Michigan became the first state to abolish the death penalty (except for treason against the state), mostly because it had no long tradition of capital punishment (there had been no hanging since 1830, before statehood) and because frontier Michigan had few established religious groups to oppose it as was the case in the east. In 1852, Rhode Island abolished the death penalty led by Unitarians, Universalists, and especially Quakers. In the same year, Massachusetts limited its death penalty to first-degree murder. In 1853, Wisconsin abolished the death penalty after a gruesome execution in which the victim struggled for five minutes at the end of the rope, and a full eighteen minutes passed before his heart finally quit.” https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/history-of-the-death-penalty/
The Flapper and Mr B, my step-father who was a lawyer and a judge, clashed about this very issue. My Mother was against capital punishment, and later became more Buddhist in her beliefs overall. I remember them arguing at the dinner table – please pass the macaroni and show me how the state has a right to take someone’s life! Today of course, there are subtle legal conditions to consider – was the crime premeditated, or if the perpetrator was a juvenile, or mentally handicapped, or maybe even if you are temporarily insane due to severe postpartum psychosis, insomnia, and hallucinations… Christa Pike fit none of these qualifications.
She was just 18 when she took her good ‘friend’ into the woods with her 17 year old boyfriend and killed her. Pike was afraid her friend, Colleen Slemmer, was trying to steal her ‘man.’ The man/boyfriend was sentenced to life in prison because he was a minor, younger than 18. Pike was accused of torturing Slemmer, which I chose not to read up on because the regular news is punishment enough. She spent 30 years on death row costing taxpayers over $100,000 a year and her prefrontal cortex wasn’t even finished growing. On Saturday night when I heard about Pike’s miraculous recovery, I also knew that Mr T was holding a rally in nearby Clarksville, TN…
“I could say the stupidest things and you’d clap,” he told the scant audience after Kid Rock introduced him. Well that’s true surprisingly. Then he promised 5K payments to everyone after the midterms. Literally, he was asking them to vote Republican and promising to pay them off. This came right after he dropped the sanctions on Russian oil, cozying up to the wannabe Czar, and dropping any illusion that we Americans were willing to fight with our Allies. You’re on your own Ukraine, because the GOP wants to mitigate the midterms.
My opinion on capital punishment has changed over the years. I was once on my step-father’s side, an eye for an eye. But with increased DNA evidence proving that mistakes have been made, that there is such a thing as a false confession, oh and throw systemic racism into the mix, I cannot abide by our government being in the business of executing prisoners. It’s barbaric. And Hegseth wanting to live stream the execution of a paralyzed terrorist? Shall we have ads offering deals online during the show?
To mitigate the news lately, I’ve turned to our latest Nobel Laureate, Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay” speaking of Emily Bronte:
“She wanted liberty. Well didn’t she have it?
A reasonably satisfactory homelife,
a most satisfactory dreamlife—why all this beating of wings?
What was this cage, invisible to us,
which she felt herself to be confined in?”
Well there are many ways of being held prisoner,
I am thinking as I stride over the moor.
As a rule after lunch mother has a nap
and I go out to walk.
The bare blue trees and bleached wooden sky of April
carve into me with knives of light.
The Flapper’s Buddha
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