Why Many Americans Think Christa Pike Should Undergo a Second Execution Attempt

On October 20, Reuters released the results of a survey showing that 33% of the American public want Tennessee to try again to put Christa Pike to death. Another 26% are undecided.

That means 59% of the public would support or be open to such a possibility. I want to suggest a reason why.

Second execution attempts are rare in this country and, as a result, the public knows little if anything about them. That may help explain why so many would give Tennessee another chance to kill Christa Pike.

As Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote more than fifty years ago, “whether or not a punishment is cruel and unusual depends…on whether people who were fully informed as to the purposes of the penalty and its liabilities would find the penalty shocking, unjust, and unacceptable.”

Marshall concluded, “Assuming knowledge of all the facts presently available regarding capital punishment, the average citizen would, in my opinion, find it shocking to his conscience and sense of justice.” What was, in Marshall’s view, true of capital punishment in general is certainly true when it comes to second execution attempts.

If the American public had “knowledge of all the facts presently available” about them, many of them would find “it shocking to [their] conscience and sense of justice.”

Second execution attempts have happened only three times in the last eighty years, once in 1947 and twice in 2024. For the people who survived a first attempt, the prospect of a second trip to the execution chamber was an almost unimaginable nightmare.

Every year, thousands of people, if not more, have near-death experiences much like those of people who survive a first execution attempt. They walk away from automobile accidents, survive gunshots, or beat the odds against supposedly fatal diseases. Many find those experiences so traumatic that they have real trouble making sense of what happened to them or integrating it into a redemptive life narrative.

In my view, the death penalty is already cruel. It involves the needless infliction of pain and, as Supreme Court Justice William Brennan once put it, the loss of “the right to have rights.” Brennan insisted that “even as it punishes, [the state] must treat its members with respect for their intrinsic worth as human beings.”

“[D]eath,” Brennan argued, “is a uniquely and unusually severe punishment. When examined by the principles applicable under the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause, death stands condemned as fatally offensive to human dignity.”

And if that is true when the state seeks to execute someone the first time, it is certainly true when an execution fails, and the state wants a do-over. In that case, the offense to dignity is compounded.

And, in every failure, the state bears the burden; it is responsible for the negligence, incompetence, or willful blindness that produces those failures. It is responsible for the terror and suffering of those whose executions fail.

Surely surviving an execution is better than dying. But each execution failure imposes on those who experience that failure the kind of excessive pain that the Supreme Court has said violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.

Take the case of seventeen-year-old Willie Francis, whom the state of Louisiana tried and failed to execute using the electric chair on May 3, 1946.

One official witness described what happened this way: “Then the electrocutioner turned on the switch and when he did, Willie Francis’ lips puffed out, and he groaned and jumped so that the chair came off the floor. Apparently the switch was turned on twice, and then the condemned man yelled, 'Take it off. Let me breath [sic].’”

Francis survived due to the negligence of the execution team. After May 3, 1946, he knew full well what a second trip to the electric chair would mean.

He litigated to prevent that from happening. But on January 13, 1947, the Supreme Court gave Louisiana the go-ahead. He was put to death on May 9, 1947, after a year of dread, contemplating a fate whose pains he knew too well.

Since then, two other execution survivors have faced a second execution.

On September 22, 2022, Alabama failed in its effort to kill Alan Miller when the execution team could not establish an intravenous (IV) line before the death warrant expired. CBS News notes that “prison staff poked him with needles for over an hour as they tried to find a vein… At one point, they left him hanging vertically on a gurney before state officials made the decision to call off the execution.”

He lived but experienced what his lawyers described as “profound post-traumatic stress and other psychological and physical symptoms” in the aftermath. Two years after the first attempt, Miller was executed, this time by nitrogen hypoxia.

One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted.

— Oscar Wilde

And just under two months after Miller’s failed execution, Alabama failed again, this time in its effort to put Kenneth Smith to death by lethal injection. The execution team repeatedly jabbed Smith with needles and even tried to place a large needle under his collarbone to insert a central line before giving up.

Fourteen months later, Alabama tried again, this time with nitrogen hypoxia. In the intervening months, Smith suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and, as the BBC reports, “lived with the constant anticipation of being strapped back onto the same gurney and subjected to a second…execution.”

Smith’s return trip to the execution chamber did not go well. He “shook and writhed” before succumbing to the gas.

Francis, Miller, and Smith all experienced what was effectively a “mock execution.” As the Equal Justice Initiative explains, “Mock executions constitute torture under federal and international law. Federal courts have found that when captors in countries like Iraq, Iran, Guatemala, and Cuba make prisoners believe they are about to be executed, but then they aren’t killed, that constitutes torture.”

EJI adds, “Unlike a traditional mock execution, a failed execution typically involves officials who intend to kill, although the torture and the suffering for the victim are no different.”

Like the other execution survivors, Christa Pike is now “dealing with the profound psychological trauma of having survived a failed execution, including the terror, pain, and uncertainty of believing she was about to die.”

I suspect that the 59% of Americans who want her to undergo a second execution attempt or are open to it do not really understand the suffering that follows a failed execution and the toll contemplating a second date with death entails.

As Justice Marshall noted, the crimes that bring people to death row often “are ugly, vicious, reprehensible acts…. The question…is whether capital punishment is ‘a punishment no longer consistent with our own self-respect.’”

Whatever one’s view about the appropriateness of the death penalty, if Americans knew about failed executions and their consequences, they would conclude that going forward with a second execution in Pike’s case would not be “consistent with our own self-respect.”

Source: verdict.justia.com, Austin Sarat, November 9, 2026

"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."
— Oscar Wilde

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