Let’s pretend that the Islamic Republic of Iran had undertaken to execute a 50-year-old woman for a crime committed when she was an 18-year-old.
Let’s say the crime was murdering a fellow female student. Let’s also say that the woman slated for execution had suffered rape and sexual abuse since she was a toddler and had been diagnosed with mental illness, later admitting: “It took me numerous years to even realise the gravity of what I’d done.”
A fair amount of international uproar would presumably ensue, alleging Iran’s barbarity in choosing to kill a woman with such a troubled past. The United States would no doubt be at the helm of the criticism.
And yet no such uproar has transpired since Wednesday’s attempted execution in the US state of Tennessee of 50-year-old Christa Pike, to whom all of the above details pertain in reality.
Pike was set to be the first woman executed in Tennessee since 1820 – lest anyone assume US society was advancing rather than regressing. However, the executioners failed in their task, and, when Pike remained alive after being injected with all manner of lethal drugs, the operation was called off and she was rushed to hospital.
Fearing the pain that would attend death by injection, Pike had initially requested to be killed by firing squad – one of various civilised options provided to death penalty victims in some US states. The request had been denied.
According to Pike’s lawyers, the failed execution amounts to “chemical torture”. The degree of brain damage Pike may have sustained due to oxygen deprivation remains to be seen.
Again, one can only imagine the sort of self-righteous denunciations that would be occasioned had Iran not only tried to execute a mentally ill woman but royally messed up the killing, potentially leaving her half-dead instead.
Of course, Iran would not be the only country that would come under fire for such a stunt; plenty of other countries in the Middle East and Africa would be similarly denounced for such savagery.
But it’s all in a day’s work in the US, where the death penalty is legal in more than half of the country’s 50 states.
Among the myriad problems with the death penalty, of course, is the frequency with which innocent folks end up being murdered. The Death Penalty Information Center reported that, “since 1973, at least 203 people who were wrongly convicted and sentenced to death in the U.S. have been exonerated.”
Recalling that capital punishment “served as a tool for controlling Black populations and discouraging rebellion” during the era of slavery in the US, the organisation noted the enduring racialised nature of state killing in the country with Black people “currently comprising 40% of the death row population despite only being 12% of the U.S. population”.
To be sure, it’s hardly shocking that the racist classism that passes for democracy in the US is reproduced in death as well as in life.
After all, what better way to uphold the capitalist hierarchy and maintain elite social control than by disproportionately incarcerating and legally murdering people of colour and the poor?
And while Pike is not Black, her attempted murder still serves the mechanism of control by reminding the nonelite of their dispensability and the ultimate arbitrariness of their fate.
Call it capitalist punishment.
Meanwhile, the state’s monopoly on killing means that many cold-blooded murderers get off scot-free – as in the case of Jonathan Ross, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer who fatally shot Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in January.
Ross, it so happens, is a veteran of the war on Iraq, where over the years the US has also engaged in a great deal of killing with impunity. And as in other locations that have had the misfortune to be in the US’s crosshairs, mass slaughter has been cast as just and civilised as long as the US is the one doing the slaughtering.
Indeed, whether it’s committing state-sanctioned execution at home or the extrajudicial killing of fishermen in the Caribbean, the US has yet to be adequately taken to task for barbarism that would have had the US itself up in arms if the tables were turned.
The prevailing double standard goes something like this: When Iran executes people, it’s a moral abomination and a crime. When the US executes people, it’s a legitimate exercise in domestic criminal justice.
As Pike remained unconscious in a Tennessee hospital, the state has paused executions for the remainder of the year as the powers that be ponder what the hell happened during the execution-that-wasn’t.
For his part, President Donald Trump – who ramped up executions during his first term and is busy replicating the feat in his second – reasoned that “it shouldn’t be very difficult” to kill someone by injection, notwithstanding what happened in Tennessee.
But as the US keeps up the killing spree at home and abroad, one can’t help but think that it shouldn’t be that easy.
