Tennessee execution team fails to carry out lethal injection

The Borrowed Gown

The permanent things are not permanent by accident. What is being attempted in Tennessee violates the first canon of conservative thought: that a transcendent moral order governs society, and that when the commonwealth acts in its gravest capacity it acts under judgement, not merely under procedure. On Thursday, Tennessee’s execution team failed to carry out the lethal injection of Christa Pike. The usual argument has begun over whether this was a technical lapse or a moral scandal. I suggest it was something older and more instructive. It was a liturgy performed in a borrowed gown, and the gown did not fit.

Consider what the state has done over the past century. It retired the rope and the scaffold, whose terrible plainness everyone understood, and put on the vestments of the clinic: the gurney, the intravenous line, the antiseptic room, the language of protocol. The inference I draw, and it is an inference, is that this was an act of moral evasion more than of mercy. If the execution looks like medicine, the citizen need not feel that the community has taken a life. Another explanation is possible, and honourable: reformers sincerely believed the needle would cause less suffering than the drop. Grant them that. The trouble is that a form brings its own standard of judgement whether we want it or not.

So it is fitting, and damning, that Pike’s lawyer and the medical experts now measure the IV team by medical standards. Tennessee’s defenders will answer that the claim of malpractice “in any other setting” is contested, and they are right to contest it. An execution is not a clinical encounter; no physician’s oath governs it, and the team is not practising medicine in any ordinary sense. But consider where that defence leads. If the work is not medicine, why is it dressed as medicine? The state cannot claim the clinic’s reassurance while refusing the clinic’s scrutiny. It has borrowed a profession’s authority without that profession’s competence, its training, or its consent, for the medical profession largely refuses to take part. What remains is men and women with needles who stand inside a form that disowns them.

I knew, in my years among old Scottish towns and Michigan stump country, something of how communities once carried their dreadful duties. The hangman was a figure out of a ghost story: shunned, half-sacred, carrying the community’s guilt so that it would not be forgotten. Nobody mistook the scaffold for a hospital ward. The ceremony was terrible because the act was terrible, and the terror was honest. A people that executes ought to feel the weight of what it does. The old forms made it feel that weight. The new forms are built so that it will not.

Now set the strongest objection against me. The abolitionist says Thursday proves the state cannot be trusted to kill and should stop. The procedural reformer says it proves only that Tennessee needs better-trained technicians and a firmer protocol. Both deserve an answer. To the reformer: more skilful technique cannot cure a confusion of category. A more efficient pretence is still a pretence, and the next failure will be judged by the same alien standard. To the abolitionist, whose case I take more seriously than many of my friends do: you may be right in the end. But you will not win the argument with a botched vein. You will win it, if you win it, by showing that the commonwealth can no longer perform the act with the solemnity the moral order requires. On that ground Thursday is strong evidence for your side.

That is the real question before Tennessee, and the stakes go well beyond the competence of one team. A lawful sentence carried out in a form its own witnesses can call malpractice weakens the law’s claim to be anything more than administration. Whatever one thinks of the death penalty, and I do not pretend the matter is simple, a state that keeps it must keep it as justice, openly owned, and not as a medical procedure that has gone unaccountably wrong.

Somewhere in Tennessee this week a strap was unbuckled and a condemned person was led back to a cell, alive by failure rather than by mercy. That is no pardon, and the law does not call it justice. It is the sound of a ritual nobody believes in being abandoned partway through.