Nice. I’ve written a lot about that already politically weaponized mess already, though, so I want to get back to Christa before she becomes the next Cindy Sheehan, an earlier Left-exploited woman who is now a trivia question. (Do you remember the reason for her 15 minutes of progressive hero status?)

In today’s New York Times, an anesthesiologist and intensive care physician who was a consultant for Pike’s defense attorneys before Pike’s failed execution writes an accusing op-ed headlined, “I Know Christa Pike’s Medical History. What Tennessee Did Is Unforgivable.” (All NYT links now get past the paywall. I think the Times is having a subscription downturn. We can hope…). My immediate reaction to that title was “No, what Christa Pike did was unforgivable: at the age of 20, she tortured and killed this teenager who had done nothing to Pike at all:

It is important to note that this is not a disinterested analyst: he’s been paid by Pike’s lawyers, and they have an agenda that he is advancing with his essay. He slyly transitions to a “Poor Christa!” angle: she was in pain, the drug used on her is poison (uh, yeah, that’s the idea), execution by lethal injection is brutality dressed up as a medical procedure, executions are not supposed to be cruel, we don’t know how much pain the murderers suffer, yadayada. He writes,

“The Supreme Court has ruled that the Constitution does not guarantee a painless execution, a decision states such as Tennessee cite to defend their lethal injection protocols. Very well. Then states should stop telling the public that lethal injection is clinical and not cruel. The illusion does not fool death row prisoners. I was a medical expert in three separate execution cases in Tennessee over the past 10 years. In each instance, the prisoner elected to die by the electric chair instead of by lethal injection.”

Note: That’s a woman, Ruth Snyder, being executed at the top in the first photo of an electric chair execution ever published.

Why should a murderer have any choice at all? Why should a state have to sell the public on a method of execution? Hold the execution in complete secrecy, and let the method of death be a surprise, but an effective surprise, like a blow to the head from a sledge hammer. States capitulated to death by lethal objection because the legal and rhetorical challenges to capital punishment have relied on appeals to emotion (the wrong emotion) for centuries, the opposition will never stop, and it has cost and will continue to cost taxpayers millions of dollars that could be more responsibly spent on, well, anything.

By complete coincidence, I was reading last night the transcript of Clarence Darrow’s 1924 debate about capital punishment against Judge Alfred J. Talley. Darrow was, of course, opposing the death penalty; he had just managed to save thrill killers Leopold and Loeb from execution with a justly-famous appeal to the judge in the case. I posted about that closing argument here and here. It is brilliant; Darrow’s performance in the debate is not (neither is the simplistic argument of the judge). There is a reason the debate didn’t make it into my book with historian Ed Larson, “The Essential Words and Writings of Clarence Darrow.”

Darrow obviously improvised in his debates. He regarded them as easy money and recreation, not preparing or organizing his thoughts as he did in his courtroom oratory. The result in this instance was rambling, lazy incoherence.

As always, Darrow argued that only the poor are executed because rich killers can afford lawyers like him. (The fact that everyone who should be isn’t executed is not a justification for never executing anybody. This is the same flawed argument wielded by those who claim capital punishment is racist. The solution is to execute more whites, not to spare black killers.) He flirts with the correlation-causation fallacy, pointing out that the states with the most executions also have the most murders. He descends into slippery slope territory: if capitol punishment is such an effective deterrent (as the judge fatuously argues), why not use it to prevent everything society doesn’t want? His audience also heard the hoary false equivalence that it is hypocritical for a state that makes murder a crime to murder convicted murderers.

Ugh. It was depressing to read. I emphatically disagree with America’s greatest trial lawyer on capital punishment, but I do find his argument in Leopold and Loeb’s trial the best argument against it anyone has made. Darrow extolled mercy, compassion and love as societal values the government should encourage by extending them even to the worst human beings among us with the goal of making society more civilized. I believe that is typical progressive utopianism, nice but fantastic. By not executing the worst of the worst who take human lives, our culture devalues human life. I might not have voted to execute Christa Pike (she doesn’t make my very high standards for “the worst of the worst”), but no one should feel sorry for her.