On: Calls grow for US death penalty halt after ‘torturous’ botched execution of...

3 October 2026

Let me state the case for the state at its most formidable, because it deserves that much. There are crimes - the torture-murder of a young woman comes to mind, and Pike’s was such - that seem to exhaust the vocabulary of punishment, and a society that declines to name its ultimate sanction for them may be accused of a certain moral fastidiousness purchased at the victim’s expense. The deterrent argument, the retributive argument, the argument from closure for the bereaved: each has been made by serious people and cannot be waved away.

Now watch what actually happened in Tennessee. A woman was strapped to the apparatus of a civilized state and, over an extended period, killed badly - not executed, killed badly, the way an amateur kills a animal in a shed - while physicians stood by, bound by their oath not to help her die and required instead to keep her alive long enough to be killed again. The state had years to devise a method. It had budgets, committees, legal counsel. It produced this.

Here is the load-bearing joint: the death penalty’s defenders insist the sanction is principled, deliberate, measured. A botched execution reveals what the thing actually is when the varnish cracks - an improvised killing performed by bureaucrats. If the punishment cannot be administered without becoming torture, then either the state is torturing people or it is lying about what it does. There is no third door.

The moratorium now demanded by lawyers and doctors is, if anything, too modest. But notice the tell: the same officials who defend the penalty in the abstract could not watch Wednesday’s proceedings without flinching. Their flinch is the argument.

One does not refine a wrong by performing it more slowly. Abolish it.