When I worked in death-penalty communications, words such as “execution,” “death warrant,” “clemency” and “lethal injection” began to sound like the ordinary vocabulary of public policy.
There is nothing ordinary about what those words mean.
Last week’s failed execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee forces us to confront that reality.
Nicole Wiesen
Pike was sentenced to death for the horrific 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. Nothing about questioning capital punishment requires minimizing Slemmer’s suffering, the brutality of her murder or the lifelong grief carried by those who loved her. Justice must begin by acknowledging victims rather than making them invisible.
But justice also requires us to ask what the state is permitted to do in our names.
On Sept. 30, Tennessee attempted to execute Pike by lethal injection. According to CNN reporting, she remained alive after receiving two doses of pentobarbital. By Friday, her attorneys reported she was unconscious, intubated and dependent on a ventilator while receiving lifesaving medical treatment. Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee ordered a third-party investigation and halted the state’s remaining scheduled execution for 2026.
“Medical professionals are now trying to preserve the life that the state attempted to end.”
Think about the contradiction contained in that sentence: Medical professionals are now trying to preserve the life that the state attempted to end.
That contradiction should trouble Christians, health professionals, policymakers and anyone concerned about human dignity.
Lethal injection is not simply “going to sleep”
The language surrounding lethal injection often makes execution sound clinical, controlled and painless. The medical evidence makes that assumption much harder to sustain.
Pike’s attorneys say improperly placed IV lines allowed pentobarbital — a highly alkaline substance — to enter tissue rather than properly circulate through her bloodstream. Her arms reportedly became swollen, burned and blistered. Witnesses reportedly heard crying, whimpering and labored breathing during the procedure.
This is not the first reason for medical concern about lethal injection.
A review discussed in reporting on lethal-injection autopsies found evidence of pulmonary edema fluid accumulating in the lungs in 84% of more than 200 autopsies examined. Medical experts have described the resulting physiological process as potentially creating sensations associated with suffocation or drowning.
There is another fundamental problem: Medicine is designed to heal.
The American Medical Association’s Code of Medical Ethics states that physicians should not participate in legally authorized executions because the profession is dedicated to preserving life when there is hope of doing so.
We therefore have created something that looks like medicine intravenous lines, medications, monitoring and clinical terminology while asking it to accomplish medicine’s opposite purpose.
Accountability does not require execution
The alternative to the death penalty is not the absence of accountability.
Life imprisonment, including life without parole where authorized, can permanently remove someone who has committed an extraordinarily serious crime from the community without requiring the government to deliberately take that person’s life. Life without parole is available as a sentencing alternative in every state that currently authorizes the death penalty.
For me, that distinction matters.
A life sentence can say: What you did caused irreparable harm. You will be held accountable.
It does not require us to add: Therefore, we will kill you.
“There is no sound basis for presenting execution as a scientifically established deterrent to homicide.”
There also is no sound basis for presenting execution as a scientifically established deterrent to homicide. The National Research Council concluded that existing research does not establish whether capital punishment increases, decreases or has no effect on homicide rates and cautioned against using those studies to make claims about deterrence.
And our criminal legal system is not infallible. Since 1973, more than 200 people sentenced to death in the United States have been exonerated, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Prison allows time for evidence to be reconsidered, convictions to be challenged and human beings to change. Execution allows none.
Christians should ask what justice requires of us
For a Christian audience, this conversation cannot be only about constitutional law or pharmacology. It also is about who we believe human beings are.
American Baptists have wrestled with this question for decades. American Baptist Churches USA has adopted multiple resolutions opposing capital punishment, citing the sacredness of human life, the fallibility of human justice and the possibility of redemption and transformation.
Those principles deserve renewed attention.
Mercy does not erase accountability. Compassion does not excuse murder. Opposing execution does not require forgetting victims.
It requires believing that punishment does not have to reproduce the violence it condemns.
I have spent years communicating about the death penalty, incarceration and the lives affected by these systems. That experience has taught me that executions do not occur only inside a chamber. They ripple outward through victims’ families, incarcerated people, correctional officers, witnesses, journalists, attorneys, clergy, medical personnel and communities.
Christa Pike’s failed execution should therefore lead to a larger question than whether Tennessee can develop a better protocol. The question is whether any protocol can transform state-administered killing into something humane.
Two-thirds of U.S. states have either abolished the death penalty or gone at least a decade without carrying out an execution. The country already has sentencing mechanisms capable of protecting communities and imposing severe accountability without execution.
States should remove death as a sentencing option and replace it with non-capital sentencing structures, including life imprisonment where appropriate.
Christa Pike should remain accountable for the life that was taken.
Colleen Slemmer should be remembered.
Her family deserves compassion, truth and support.
And our response to violence should demonstrate something more than our capacity to inflict another death.
The measure of a justice system is not simply how severely it can punish the person who has done the worst thing. It is whether, even in those moments, we remain committed to human dignity.
A government can protect society without executing its citizens.
And a society that chooses life over death does not abandon justice.
It chooses a different understanding of what justice can be.
Nicole L. Wiesen is a nationally recognized expert in Post-Incarceration Syndrome, public health social worker, consultant, lecturer and author. She is the founder of Returning Her Home, a trauma-informed reentry housing and support initiative dedicated to helping women heal, stabilize and successfully reintegrate following incarceration.