There are moments when the argument over the death penalty stops being abstract.
It stops being a debate conducted through statistics, politics, court filings, Bible verses, or old ideas about what justice is supposed to look like. It becomes something much more immediate and much harder to ignore. A human being is strapped down by the state. Chemicals are pushed into their body. Witnesses watch. Families wait. Attorneys wait. Prison staff wait. Then, after Tennessee administers two doses of a drug intended to kill, the person is still alive.
That is what happened when Tennessee attempted to execute Christa Pike on September 30.
Pike was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer. Slemmer’s murder was horrific. Nothing about opposing Pike’s execution should be mistaken for minimizing that fact, excusing what happened, or disregarding the grief that Slemmer’s family has carried for more than three decades. They have suffered a loss no family should have to endure, and they deserve compassion, support, honesty, and justice.
But justice is not the same thing as revenge. And it is not made more just because the government performs it in a controlled room with witnesses and a medical-looking procedure.
Tennessee officials gave Pike two doses of pentobarbital, the drug used in the state’s lethal-injection protocol. Yet the execution could not be completed. Pike remained alive, and her attorneys later said she was in critical condition, unconscious, and receiving life support at a hospital. The Associated Press reported that Tennessee halted its remaining executions for the year after the failed attempt. PBS NewsHour documented how the episode renewed scrutiny of Tennessee’s death-penalty procedures.
Gov. Bill Lee ordered a third-party review and halted further executions for the rest of the year. That was the correct immediate response. It was also not enough.
Tennessee should not merely review how it executes people. It should ask whether it should be executing people at all.
I understand why many Americans support the death penalty. I understand the instinct. When someone commits an act of unimaginable violence, it can feel morally unbearable to say that person should remain alive. People want punishment that matches the harm. They want to feel that the legal system recognizes the full weight of a stolen life.
I also understand why some people reach for faith when they defend capital punishment. The phrase “an eye for an eye” has been repeated for generations as a justification for retaliation. It is drawn from biblical passages including Exodus 21, Leviticus 24, and Deuteronomy 19. But it is worth remembering that the phrase was also understood as a limit on revenge, a demand that punishment be proportionate rather than endless or personal.
Then there are the other verses people often skip over. “Love your neighbor as yourself.” “Blessed are the merciful.” “Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone.”
Faith can lead people to very different conclusions about the death penalty. I am not here to tell anyone their beliefs are invalid. But I do think we have to be honest about the contradiction when people describe themselves as unquestionably pro-life, then make an exception when the person facing death is someone they believe does not deserve compassion.
That tension is not limited to Republicans. There are Democrats who oppose abortion rights but support the death penalty, and there are Democrats who support abortion rights while also defending executions. Americans have learned how to compartmentalize our values when a difficult question becomes politically useful.
But state-sanctioned killing should not be a partisan talking point. It should be one of the most serious moral questions we ever ask.
The simplest reason I oppose the death penalty is this. The government should not have the power to deliberately kill its own citizens.
Life without parole is punishment. It keeps a person incarcerated. It protects the public. It acknowledges the severity of a crime without creating an irreversible outcome. If new evidence is discovered, if a conviction is later overturned, if DNA evidence changes the case, or if a prosecutor’s misconduct becomes clear years later, a life sentence can be revisited.
An execution cannot.
That should matter in a legal system run by human beings, because human beings make mistakes. Police make mistakes. Prosecutors make mistakes. Judges make mistakes. Jurors make mistakes. Defense lawyers can be overworked, underfunded, or ineffective. Witnesses can be wrong. Evidence can be mishandled. False confessions happen. Racial bias and economic inequality affect who gets charged, who gets the best legal defense, who receives plea offers, and who is sentenced most harshly.
We do not have a justice system immune from error. We have a justice system that is supposed to correct error when it finds it. The death penalty removes that possibility forever.
And then there is what happened to Christa Pike.
Tennessee had already paused executions for three years after an independent review found serious problems with the state’s lethal-injection process. The review found that the Tennessee Department of Correction had not consistently tested execution drugs as required, raising serious questions about whether the state had the ability to carry out executions lawfully and without unnecessary suffering. PBS NewsHour reported on the earlier pause and the findings that preceded Tennessee’s decision to resume executions.
That history matters because Pike’s failed execution was not an unforeseeable accident. It happened in a state that already knew its execution system had problems. It happened after warnings, reviews, lawsuits, delays, and public scrutiny. Tennessee had years to prove it could carry out the ultimate punishment in a way that was competent, lawful, and humane.
It still failed.
Supporters of capital punishment may say the answer is to fix the protocol. Use a different drug. Improve staff training. Create stronger checks. Add more medical expertise. Hold someone accountable.
But that answer ignores the deeper issue. We are asking a government bureaucracy, with all of its ordinary weaknesses, political pressures, budget problems, secrecy, and human errors, to do something morally permanent. We are asking it to end a life. Then we act surprised when its systems fail.
There is no perfectly humane method of execution. There is only a more polished way of arranging a death.
The people most often left out of this conversation are the families.
Colleen Slemmer’s family deserves respect. I cannot pretend to know what would bring them peace, and neither should anyone else. Some victims’ families support executions. Some oppose them. Some have said the death penalty forced them to relive a loved one’s murder through decades of appeals, hearings, media attention, and delayed execution dates. Others believe it is the only punishment that properly recognizes the life that was taken.
Both responses are human. Both deserve to be heard.
What I reject is the idea that the state can promise closure and then use grieving families as proof that executions work. There is no universal kind of closure. There is no court ruling, execution date, or lethal injection that can restore a person who was murdered. The legal system should offer families long-term counseling, financial support, clear information, respectful treatment, and a process that does not turn their pain into a political argument.
The families of people on death row also deserve compassion. That does not mean denying the seriousness of the crime. It means acknowledging that execution punishes more than one person. Parents, children, siblings, spouses, and friends are left to live with the knowledge that the government intentionally killed someone they loved. They may believe that person deserves punishment and still be devastated by the execution.
We do not make society safer by producing more grief.
The death penalty also tells us something troubling about how we think of power. We say government should be limited. We say bureaucracies should be held accountable. We say the Constitution matters. We say courts should not overreach.
Yet we give the state its most extreme power and expect it to use that power flawlessly.
That is not conservative. That is not liberal. It is not progressive, libertarian, religious, or patriotic. It is dangerous.
Tennessee has a choice now. It can treat Christa Pike’s failed execution as an embarrassing technical problem, make a few changes, and try again. Or it can treat the moment as a moral warning.
I hope the state chooses the second path.
Abolishing the death penalty would not erase Colleen Slemmer’s murder. It would not make Pike innocent. It would not make the pain of victims’ families disappear. But it would mean Tennessee stops adding death to a system already defined by loss.
Life without parole can hold people accountable. It can protect the public. It can leave room for truth, evidence, mercy, and correction. Most of all, it can prevent the state from carrying out another execution that becomes a spectacle of suffering rather than an act of justice.
The question is not whether murder is wrong. We already know it is.
The question is whether the answer to murder should be more killing.
I do not believe it should.
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