Christa Pike still lives – thirty years after she murdered another young woman also enrolled in a Job Corps facility. She still lives after executioners in Tennessee gave her two separate (supposedly) lethal injections in the same couple of hours. There is a rather obvious lesson here – it is difficult to kill someone nicely.
When I was at TSJC, I heard of the execution of Black Jack Ketchum in an adjacent New Mexico county. They gave him a long drop that beheaded him. The Nazis convicted at Nuremburg got short drops – a particularly nasty way to go. These incidents aren’t examples of judicial cruelty – the fact is that it’s difficult to hire experienced, competent executioners anymore.
Firing squads, with five rifles, aren’t perfect. In South Carolina, the shooters missed Mikal Mahdi’s heart and hit his liver and pancreas. Utah maintained the firing squad for years – but Wallace Wilkerson’s firing squad, at twenty feet, got Wilkerson to shout “Oh my God! My God! They missed!” It wasn’t a clean miss – it took him 27 minutes before he was pronounced dead. That was 1879. In 1951, Eliseo J. Mares, shot from 15 feet away, died “silently and horribly” with two of the four bullets fired hitting his abdomen and hip. It may be that the United States have never had all that many experienced, competent executioners. Heck, even England’s King Henry VIII had to get a headsman sent in from France to execute Ann Boleyn – took him 9 days to get to the site.
I recognize that capital punishment has its place – not so much as punishment as that there are people who are just too dangerous to others to be kept even in prisons. Perhaps, when an execution is needed, our various legal systems should follow the example or Henry VIII – the world’s competent, professional executioners now work with the Medical Assistance In Dying section of Canada’s health care system.
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