Another One Bites the Dust (But Temporarily Recovers via Intubation and State-Funded ICU Care)

Nothing says “we don’t know what we’re doing” quite like a sequel to a lethal injection — that was the thought that came to my mind as I read of the failed execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee yesterday.

In the old days, if the hanging rope snapped, it was deemed an “Act of God,” and you were set free because the Almighty had clearly intervened via a frayed hemp fibre. Today, if the lethal injection fails, it’s deemed an “Act of Substandard Procurement.” Someone bought the generic brand of pentobarbital to save forty cents on the dollar or the unnamed executioner couldn’t find a vein because he was nervous. The whole procedure needs to be expensively re-executed at the next available court-appointed date.

As of today, after managing to survive two lethal injections, convicted murderer Christa Pike remains stubbornly, inconveniently, and expensively alive. It is the ultimate customer service failure of the Tennessee lethality industry; it’s like trying to cancel a subscription, pressing the “delete account” button twice, and finding out you have been upgraded to a premium subscription.

Christa Pike’s survival has plunged Tennessee into a paradox: they are now legally and morally obligated to use top-tier, state-funded medical technology to keep the person they just tried to kill from dying.

The state is currently funding an intensive care unit to frantically clear the lethal drugs from her system, nursing her back to health, specifically so the state can wheel her right back into the exact same room and try to murder her again with better lighting conditions.

We must contemplate the magnificent, cruel irony embedded within our English language regarding the word “execute.”

It is a linguistic double-agent, a word that simultaneously means “to successfully perform a complex technical task” and “to deliberately terminate a human being.”

When an executive boasts about their ability to “execute a plan,” they are visualizing a crisp PowerPoint presentation of a seamless corporate merger — not strapping an inmate to a gurney and hunting for a vein with a syringe full of veterinary tranquilizers. But in the grand, Kafkaesque theater of the Tennessee Department of Correction, these two definitions have collided in spectacular fashion.

One has to admire the economic efficiency of Christa Pike’s execution of her execution plan.

Back in January 1995, an eighteen-year-old Christa Pike, driven by teenage romantic jealousy, managed to end another woman’s life using nothing more than raw malice and a jagged, discarded chunk of roadside infrastructure — fracturing her victim’s skull with a piece of asphalt. It required no budget, no specialized medical training, and absolutely zero logistical planning.

Yet today, the entire sovereign State of Tennessee — equipped with billions of dollars in taxpayer funding, an army of highly trained correctional officers, a dedicated legal department, a state-of-the-art death chamber, and a monopoly on legalized violence — cannot figure out how to put a middle-aged woman to sleep.

It is a testament to the inefficiency of modern bureaucracy that a teenager with some gravel can achieve what an entire justice system finds baffling.

Another absurdity lies in the fact that the state is currently trying to kill a 50-year-old woman for a crime she committed when she was 18. To spend 32 years on death row — more than three decades trapped in a concrete purgatory — surely satisfies the quota for “punishment” in the phrase capital punishment. By any logical metric, that is a lifetime sentence already served. But the American justice system doesn’t do logic; it does paperwork.

Enter Governor Bill Lee, who has responded to this absolute horror show with the ultimate weapon of the modern bureaucrat: he called for a comprehensive, third-party safety audit. A safety audit! For an execution!

The black comedy of applying middle-management jargon to a state-sponsored killing is breathtaking. Calling for a “safety audit” assumes the problem is that the state’s murder machine lacks the proper ISO-9001 certification, rather than its macabre practice of killing people.