US: convicted murderer survives execution
In the US state of Tennessee, the execution of a woman who had been on death row since 1996 failed on Wednesday. Christa Pike (50), was taken to hospital after surviving two lethal injections. Although views on the death penalty differ the media are united in their opposition to such executions.
No such thing as a dignified execution
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung sees the incident as corroboration of its opposition to the death penalty:
“The crimes committed by those on death row are often horrific – assuming they were rightly convicted. Also this week, a man who was found to be innocent was released from death row in Utah after 40 years. Christa Pike never denied that she and a friend tortured and murdered a young woman. Nevertheless, her failed execution shows just how right the Federal Republic of Germany was in 1949 to abolish the death penalty: human dignity is inviolable. And there is no such thing as a dignified execution. Nor does it bring the victims back.”
Sadism instead of justice
Info.cz is outraged:
“The news coming from the prison in Tennessee sounds more like a perverse medical experiment than 21st century justice. Christa Pike, sentenced to death row for a brutal murder committed in 1995, has become the protagonist of a horror story almost without precedent in modern history. ... This botched execution is a sad indictment of a system that indulges in the purest form of sadism under the guise of humanity. The central figure in this macabre story certainly deserves to die. But she should have been executed 30 years ago – in a dignified manner.”
A supposedly perfect death cermony
A terrible ritual has been exposed, notes La Repubblica:
“Every execution is a vile ceremony, some more so than others. ... The two bulletproof glass partitions which separate supporters and opponents, as in the most despicable of talk shows; the thirst for revenge of the victim's relatives; the the accredited journalists' hunger for headlines; the false solemnity of the executioners who reject the title of executioner by carrying out otherwise innocuous tasks such as inserting needles, pressing buttons, drawing curtains, switching off lights. At the centre of the stage, a person dies. What's so bad about that? What could be worse? That something goes wrong. Or goes right – depending on your point of view. And that the false decorum of the ritual is exposed because in this well-lit room something fails to go according to plan.”
Executioner and healer in one
Avvenire reflects on the fact that following the failed execution life-saving measures were taken:
“The state as executioner, the state as healer. The hand that kills is the hand that saves. The cruel paradox of a state that considers itself all-powerful. ... One question looms large here: what does the state's protocol provide for in the – admittedly unlikely – event that its life-saving measure proves successful and the woman sentenced to death does not die but is detoxified from the poison administered to her by the state as executioner? Should this woman return to her place on death row and, in a tragic, grotesque and surreal 'second try', be led to the scaffold once more? A case study for legal scholars. A failure of humanity.”