Why Do We Execute?

Much media attention has been paid to the failed execution of Christa Pike. Pike was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer, and her execution – initially scheduled for the evening of September 30, 2026 – would have made her the first woman to be executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years. Pike’s legal team had previously argued that certain medical factors could complicate an execution by lethal injection – causing undue pain and suffering in the process. Pike had, for this reason, even gone so far as to request execution via hanging. These concerns were sufficiently serious for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit to issue a stay of execution just one hour prior to Pike’s execution. The US Supreme Court immediately overturned the stay, and the execution went ahead.

Pike survived the initial administration of a lethal dose of pentobarbital. Per Tennessee law, a second dose was then administered. Pike also survived this. With no execution protocol to cover such cases, Pike was hospitalized. She now remains there, intubated on a ventilator, in a coma, and suffering various injuries resulting from the failed execution.

The aftermath of these events has been widespread. Tennessee Department of Correction Commissioner Frank Strada (who had presided over five such failed executions) has resigned. At the same time, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has issued a pause on all executions in Tennessee and announced a comprehensive third-party review of the state’s execution system.

Pike’s case raises all kinds of important moral questions. However, as someone who spends a lot of time thinking about the ethics of punishment, I’m particularly interested in what our response to Pike’s case tells us about why we punish in the first place.

Punishment is weird. It’s weird, in that it largely involves treating some people in ways that it would clearly be impermissible to treat other people. Generally speaking, it’s wrong for me to take someone’s money, or to lock them in a room, or to kill them. Yet all of these things are, in certain circumstances, seen as justifiable when done in the name of punishment (we call them fines, imprisonment, and the death penalty, respectively). What, then, provides us with a moral justification for treating people in these ways?

Generally, moral justifications for punishment fall into one of two categories: those that are consequentialist and those that are retributivist. Consequentialist justifications for punishment are forward-looking. They seek to justify punishing a criminal now because it will lead to certain goods in the future. What kind of goods are we talking about? For the most part, it’s deterrence. By punishing now, we hope to reduce the likelihood of other crimes being committed in the future. And that deterrence is two-fold. For one, punishment can deter the offender from re-offending. But punishing criminals can also have a deterrent effect on the wider community. When we see someone receiving a speeding ticket, we are (hopefully) less likely to speed ourselves – lest we receive the same punishment.

So how might the consequentialist approach Pike’s case? As a consequentialist, we might think that the greater the punishment, the greater the deterrence. If we buy that line of reasoning, then it makes sense to respond to the most serious crimes with the most harmful punishments at our disposal. What Pike went through might be most accurately described as torture. Torture which – we should assume – will still be followed by her eventual death. In this way, Pike has been harmed far more than we initially intended. On a consequentialist approach, this would seem to be a good thing – since this additional harm can only serve to purchase additional deterrence. Yet reactions to Pike’s treatment have been (outside certain radical groups) largely negative – indicating that this kind of consequentialist reasoning doesn’t accurately describe our attitude towards her case.

Retributivist justifications for punishment, on the other hand, are backward-looking. They seek to justify punishing a criminal now on the basis of what that person has done in the past. An important concept for retributivists is desert – the intuitive idea that bad actions deserve bad consequences. But how do we work out precisely what somebody deserves? One common retributivist approach is to explain this in terms of rights – specifically, the rights we forfeit when we do something wrong. A murderer, for example, violates another person’s right to life. In doing so – argues the retributivist – the murderer forfeits their own right to life, and so makes their execution morally permissible.

There are numerous problems with this approach (what does it prescribe as the appropriate punishment for arson, or tax evasion, for example?) But in Pike’s case, it proves informative. Our negative reactions might be a recognition that while Pike has forfeited her right to life, there are many other rights she has not forfeited – such as her rights to shelter, food, clean water, and medical care. This is precisely why inmates on death row are still provided with all of these things. An additional – and particularly salient – right she has not forfeited is her right to not be tortured; a right that was subsequently violated during her failed execution.

Understood in this way, retributivism seems better-suited to explaining our reactions to Pike’s case. But it might go even further. While many jurisdictions across the US make use of the death penalty, none endorses torture (at least, not explicitly). This seems to indicate that there are certain harms too great – too barbarous – to be implemented in our legal system. Essentially, torture is seen as worse than execution. But if this is true – and if what Pike went through can accurately be described as torture – then there is a sense in which she has already received more than what she deserves. If that’s the case, then any justification for carrying through with her execution at some point in the future might very well have expired.