There are many arguments that can be made in favour of the Death Penalty. It can bring closure to the trauma suffered by the criminal’s victims and it takes the criminal out of circulation permanently. It might be a deterrent to others minded to commit the sort of crimes that lead to the State and the subjects or citizens of the State, putting the criminal to death. There is also a moral logic to taking the lives of those who commit the worst of crimes, it gives a message that some crimes are so egregious that only the ultimate penalty will suffice.

There are also arguments against the Death Penalty. It’s final, there’s no way of calling back the result of a death penalty case if it later transpires that for example the police fabricated evidence or witness statements or were disregarding evidence that would either exonerate or lessen any culpability of the suspect. We know in Britain that the police lie. There are countless videos out there of British cops not knowing the law or just making shit up as they go along. If they will lie over something small such as bullshitting about the law the officer was misquoting in order to move on a Christian preacher because someone complained they were ‘offended’ by his preaching, something very small in potential consequences, then they will lie about bigger stuff even if the case they were handling is a Death Penalty case.

If we in Britain could totally trust that our courts were honest and efficient and that the ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ test was being properly applied by the Jury, then I’d have less qualms about the Death Penalty. But this doesn’t always happen. Judges make mistakes in summing up, the Prosecution KC innocently puts forward tainted or questionable evidence from those further down the prosecution chain and the Defence KC misses it and it’s therefore not challenged. You can get perverse and occasionally perverted juries where for reasons other than the evidence presented to the court the jury votes guilty or not guilty and some jurors have introduced stuff from outside the court into the jury room and deliberations. Many of these considerations also apply to other adversarial legal systems including that of the USA.

There’s a whole lot of things that can go wrong in a court case that makes me uneasy about the return of the Death Penalty to the UK. There’s also the matter of who would be the ultimate decider in the lottery of who gets reprieved and who goes to the gallows? In Britain I would suspect that such a decision would go to the Supreme Court for the Law Lords to decide or it might, as used to happen in Britain, the Home Secretary making the final decision to either reprieve or ‘let the law take its course’. Does anyone fancy having Shabana Mahmood as the ultimate governmental official to make the decision between life and death? Want the death-watch calendar on her office wall? Anyone? Think Ms Mahmood or someone worse would be a suitable individual to decide life or death? No, that’s not something I fancy. I do not trust the British state sufficiently to empower them with the Death Penalty.

However, if a nation is to have a death penalty then it’s got to be seen by the public to be fairly given and given to those who are the worst of the worst and not, as it was in Britain, dished out to all murderers who then entered the reprieve lottery. It also should not torture the offender before death nor prolong their agonising wait for death. There’s no ‘nice’ way to kill someone but a death penalty method should also be one that doesn’t impose undue pain and suffering to the person being executed.

None of the above requirements appear to have been met in the Christa Pike case. Whilst I accept that her crime is absolutely horrific and maybe she deserved the sentence she got, there’s an element of torture in the length of time she waited for execution. In a functioning Western society it should be possible for the courts to make final decisions on death penalty cases in a significantly shorter time than the thirty years it took to make a final decision in the Pike case. Maybe the US court system, both State and Federal, is as sclerotic and as inefficient as our own? If it is then there may well be massive case backlogs going through the courts.

As to the method of execution, lethal injection, it’s something that I’m opposed to because there are multiple parts of the procedure that can go wrong. Veins can’t be found or IV lines are put in the wrong place or go intramuscular instead of venous. It’s not as quick and as clean as its proponents claim it is, it might make things look less gruesome for those who witness executions but it’s not a swift process and like the Gas Chamber often requires the prisoner to assist in his own death either by taking deep breaths in the Gas Chamber or helping to find a vein on their own bodies with Lethal Injection executions. This is an aspect of these execution methods that I find to be deeply morally uncomfortable.

If we assume that Christa Pike was fairly tried and fairly sentenced then she should have got death earlier without the horrendous wait that tortured both Pike herself and the relatives of her victims who may want the closure of an execution. In the light of the failed attempt to execute Pike an attempt which may well have crippled her, I’m wondering if Pike should have been given her wish to be executed by hanging?

Done right it would certainly have ended her life with more certainty, less need to her to cooperate in her own execution, less unnecessary suffering for her, less emotional trauma to those carrying out the execution and less time taken to carry it out. Some sources say that in a British method of judicial hanging, unconsciousness caused by the separation of the spinal chord only takes 0.75 of a second after the trapdoors are opened, although full body death takes longer. That’s the time it takes for the victim to fall through the trapdoors and for the noose to tighten and bring about the ‘hangman’s fracture’ of the neck.

One of the advantages of the British Judicial Hanging method is that it is quick, there’s very little agonising preparation time as there is with Lethal Injection, the Gas Chamber, Electrocution or the Firing Squad. It can be carried out from the second that the prisoner is pinioned for the scaffold to being dead in under 10 to 15 seconds. It takes that very small amount of time for the prisoner to be told to stand up by the prison guard to being lifeless at the end of the rope. This it is hoped spares the prisoner, the prison guards, the Governor of the gaol, the High Sheriff of the County where the execution is held, the Padre and other staff who all need to be present at an execution, of an extended scene that might get emotionally traumatic. American executions are already protracted affairs with the need for the death warrant to be read to the prisoner at the last moment, I’m with one of Britain’s most famous hangmen on this issue which is that it prolongs already long execution preparation times and causes unnecessary distress to the prisoner.

If a society is to have a death penalty then it must be by a method that is swift and sure. It should be a method that is less prone to vicissitudes and variability of things like veins and the skill of technicians to find and insert IV’s into them or the electrical conductivity of skin, or the aim of a group of marksmen or the need for the prisoner to deliberately inhale Hydrogen Cyanide gas. Measured drop hanging has none of the above disadvantages.

If Christa Pike was to have been executed and if she deserved her fate then I do believe that had the US courts accepted her plea to be hung instead of being lethally injected, then the whole gruesome situation with the failed execution might have been avoided. She would been gone with less fuss, less trauma, less media circus and less of a chance of an Eighth Amendment legal fight. For my British readers the 8th Amendment bans ‘cruel and unusual punishment’. The text from 1791 reads: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.” This is almost word for word a passage from the English Bill of Rights of 1689 which read:’That excessive bail ought not to be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted’

The legal aftermath of the failed execution of Christa Pike is likely to get pretty messy. As well as potential 8^th Amendment cases there’s going to be all sorts of other legal trials and tribulations which could go on for years and affect other Death Penalty cases. This case is leaving legal havoc in its wake and it might all have been avoided if Christa Pike’s choice of execution method had been employed. Confusion reigns supreme about this case, will she be turned into some sort of bed bound vegetable by the failed execution, will the State of Tennessee have another go at the execution of this prisoner whether she be compos mentis or not or will some form of permanent stay of execution be deployed, if only as a face saver for the politicians?

I’m not in favour of the death penalty returning to Britain. I can see that there are some prisoners and some criminals who may deserve death but the British State is not trustworthy enough to be permitted the power of the death penalty. There are too many opportunities from the arrest of the subject to the placing of the noose around the hooded prisoner’s neck, for things to go wrong. Evidence can be falsified or misread, Counsel may make errors or conduct the case in a sub-optimal way, judges can be biased or by way of an inadvertent sin of omission, fail to fairly sum up a case to a Jury. There’s masses that can go wrong in a court case. Without the death penalty there is a chance to put right both innocent wrongs in a case as well as malevolent wrongs and exonerate the defendant or vary his time in gaol. You can’t do that when there’s a death penalty. Mistakes or malevolence in the trial process cannot be reversed when there is a death penalty. It’s also likely that if Britain returned the death penalty we would quite rightly both morally and legally have to have an extensive and lengthy appeals system in order to ensure as far as possible the correct justifications as to whether this terminal sentence should be carried out or not. We could end up in a similar position to our American cousins with lengthy waits between sentence and execution.

It would be quite rightly nearly impossible to reintroduce the ‘three clear Sunday’s rule about the length of time betwixt sentence and execution as it would probably be morally unacceptable today by the public. It might be seen too swift a time between sentence and penalty. There would be so many ‘edge’ cases in capital murder cases where there are aspects of a case that might make the ultimate punishment less justifiable. If we had a death penalty back it’s likely that public campaigns for mercy would abound especially if we had the reprieve lottery back or the fate of prisoners being decided by politicians who are vulnerable to political pressures, to spare or damn them.

Maybe Christa Pike deserved to die for what she did, the family of her victim certainly think she does and I can see where they are coming from. However I don’t think that she deserved what happened during the botched execution. If a society is to execute it’s worst criminals and that a fair legal process of appeal by the criminal has been exhausted, then they should not languish in gaol for decades awaiting death. Execution methods should not be, as Lethal Injections are, set up to make the viewing experience for the execution witnesses more comfortable, they should be to induce as humane a death as possible. There was nothing remotely humane about the attempt to execute Christa Pike, it was monstrously inhumane and may have unforeseen political and legal consequences in the United States. A suitable rope and a copy of the Home Office Table of Drops might have prevented a problem that some predicted would happen. Unfortunately the failed attempt to execute Pike makes the State look incompetent, could unleash all manner of legal and political troubles and creates further agony for the families of Pike’s victim. This case should not have ended like this it really should not. It should not have ended up in such an awful mess.