Last night, the State of Tennessee attempted to execute Christa Pike.
After state officials administered two doses of the lethal-injection drug pentobarbital, she remained alive. Officials eventually halted the execution and transported her to a hospital for medical care. Her condition, as of today, remains unknown.
The French-Algerian philosopher and novelist Albert Camus laid bare the brutality of execution in his 1957 essay, Reflections on the Guillotine. Shortly after World War I, his father attended the execution of a man convicted of murdering a family of farmers, including several children. Appalled by the killing of children, he attended the execution expecting the grim reassurance of justice carried out. Instead, he returned home shaken, compulsively vomiting and unable to eat.
“He had just discovered the reality hidden under the noble phrases with which it was masked,” Camus writes. “Instead of thinking of the slaughtered children, he could think of nothing but that quivering body that had just been dropped onto a board to have its head cut off.”
That morning, Camus says, transformed his father’s perspective.
The execution did not restore order or affirm the rule of law. Stripped of legal ritual and civic justification, it appeared for what it was: a deliberate, intimate act of violence administered by the state. Camus insisted on confronting the reality that law and legalese can obscure—that capital punishment is not merely an idea, a policy or a deterrent, but a human body slain in the name of justice.
We no longer gather in public squares to watch the condemned die. That retreat from public view is often mistaken for moral progress, but it changes nothing about the act itself. It merely trades the public spectacle of execution for private agony and clothes it in the sterile language and imagery of medicine: intravenous lines, syringes, protocols and curtains.
Concealment makes the violence—and the suffering it inflicts—easier for the rest of us not to see. But privacy does not make execution any more humane.
“When the extreme penalty simply causes vomiting on the part of the respectable citizen it is supposed to protect,” Camus asks, “how can anyone maintain that it is likely, as it ought to be, to bring more peace and order into the community?”
He continues: “Rather, it is obviously no less repulsive than the crime, and this new murder, far from making amends for the harm done to the social body, adds a new blot to the first one.”
As Camus conceived of it, capital punishment is ritualistic violence. It claims to achieve closure and finality—a final balancing of the moral ledger. But violence does not launder violence. It only changes who gets to call it lawful. It does not unbreak the family. It does not undo the years of fear, grief and absence. Instead, the death penalty chases an illusion: certainty in a world that cannot supply it and moral finality in a world where nothing that matters is ever so clean. It pretends we can perfect what is, at best, a managed imperfection—and heal loss with another death.
None of this diminishes the horror of Colleen Slemmer’s murder, or the immeasurable potential unfairly stolen from her. One cannot atone—at least not fully, in my estimation—for taking another person’s life. But neither can the state heal that loss by taking another.
A just society punishes decisively and protects the public without making a sacrament of killing or claiming a godlike certainty it does not, and cannot, possess.
Last night, Tennessee claimed that godlike power—and exposed the obscenity beneath it. The state strapped a woman to a gurney, injected her twice with drugs intended to end her life, failed to kill her, and then transported her to a hospital where others would try to preserve the life the state had just attempted to terminate.
Much of the commentary I have seen so far has focused on Ms. Pike and her crimes, brutal and grotesque as they were. But in the end, the death penalty is not about the perpetrator’s humanity. It is about ours.