Tennessee execution team fails to carry out lethal injection

The matter is this: on Thursday, the State of Tennessee strapped Christa Pike to a table to kill her, and could not do it. Its execution team, whose task was to place an intravenous line and then use it, failed at the first half of that task. The question is whether any of the reasons given for the current arrangement would survive a conversation with someone who owed it nothing.

Leave aside, for a page, whether a state ought to kill at all. That is a large question and an honest one, and it is not the one Thursday raises. Thursday raises a smaller and more embarrassing one. Why is a punishment carried out by government dressed in the costume of a hospital?

Consider what is actually on the table. There is a gurney, a line, a needle, a vein. There are people standing over a prone body, looking for the place to insert a tube. Every object in that room was borrowed from medicine. It was borrowed for a reason, and the reason is plain. The rope and the chair look like what they are. The needle looks like care. A public that would flinch at the gallows will accept the clinic, because the clinic is where we go to be made well.

So the state took medicine’s appearance. Did it take medicine’s obligations with it? Pike’s lawyer and the medical experts who spoke on Thursday say no. They argue that what the team did would be called malpractice in any other setting, and they describe its work as apparent incompetence. Those are their claims, and the state will dispute them. But notice what the dispute itself admits. Nobody can say whether the team met the standard, because no one will say what the standard is. In a hospital, a failed line is measured against a known practice, a licence, a review board, and the prospect of a lawsuit. In the death chamber it is measured against nothing. The state is not supervised by anyone but itself.

The strongest answer to this deserves a fair hearing, and it goes like so. An execution is not medicine. Its aim is death, not health. Physicians’ own ethics forbid them to take part. It is therefore a category error to hold an execution team to the standards of a profession that refuses to touch the work. Opponents of capital punishment, the argument continues, know this perfectly well. They invoke malpractice not to improve executions but to make them impossible.

There is something to this, and I grant it. But follow it to the end and see where it leaves the state. If the work is not medicine, then the state has no business wearing medicine’s coat. It cannot borrow the reassurance of the needle and refuse the accountability that comes attached to the needle everywhere else. A man who puts on a surgeon’s gown to reassure his patient, and then answers every complaint by saying he is no surgeon, has not refuted the complaint. He has confessed to the gown.

Now apply the hereditary test. Suppose no state had ever executed anyone by injection, and a legislator rose today and proposed it. The method, he says, will use the tools of medicine, performed by people who are not bound by medicine’s rules, whose training no one outside the department may examine, whose failures will be reviewed by the very department that employs them. Would any reasonable person accept that proposal as written? I doubt the legislator would finish the sentence before someone asked who checks the work. The arrangement survives not because it answers that question but because it was settled before anyone thought to ask it.

That is the plain translation of what Tennessee is defending. Not the death penalty as such, but a particular bargain: the look of a procedure without the rules of one. The look does real work. It keeps the public comfortable. The absence of rules does real work too. It keeps the state unexaminable. Thursday is what happens when both halves of that bargain are tested at once, on a living woman, in a locked room.

You need no expert to judge this, and no tradition to consult. You need only ask whether a government that cannot find a vein should be trusted to tell you, afterwards and unwatched, that it did everything correctly. Somewhere in Tennessee there is a gurney with the straps undone, and a needle in a bin, and a report being written by the people who held it.