08.10.2026

Cruel and unusual treatment

Her botched execution is a gruesome reminder of the utterly barbaric nature of the death penalty, says Eddie Ford. But what about dealing with counterrevolutionaries during a bitterly fought civil war?

Christa Pike, the US death row inmate, was “conscious and speaking” on the night of October 6 after surviving two supposedly lethal injections in Tennessee’s Riverbend Maximum Security Institution. Her apparent recovery is described as “medically unprecedented” and, while her prognosis remains unclear, her defence team say that “at a minimum, we expect a long recovery.” They expressed their gratitude that the first responders and the medical team at the hospital “treated Christa like a human”.

By contrast, in a display of utter barbarity, Pike remained handcuffed and shackled to her hospital bed, while doctors tried to clear her body of the injected chemicals. Becoming the only person known to have survived a complete execution attempt in the US, there has been widespread revulsion over her botched execution. Frankly, it amounted to nothing more than state torture. On top of all that, she underwent nearly 30 years of solitary confinement on death row.

But we now have the appalling possibility, of course, that the authorities might try to kill and torture her again if she recovers sufficiently from the first attempt - whether by injecting pentobarbital once more, or using some other grisly method.

Commute sentence

Moreover, surely Christa Pike’s sentence should be commuted with a view to her eventual release from prison. Her lawyers have filed for clemency on the basis that her execution would be unjust, given she was just 18 at the time of the crime and her own horrific experiences as a teenager. Bill Lee, governor of Tennessee, has paused all executions in the state for the remainder of the year.

Pike, now aged 50, would have been the first woman executed in that state since 1820. She and her boyfriend lured a 19-year-old classmate into woods, where they tortured and killed her. A media frenzy broke out and she was portrayed as evil incarnate. In fact, she herself was a victim who had suffered extreme and violent abuse since she was a child, including being raped by several strangers, as well as beatings by her relatives. Pike was subsequently diagnosed with bipolar and post-traumatic stress disorders.

In what was expected to be her final statement, Pike said she loved both her supporters and those who hated her alike. During the execution attempt, according to her lawyers, prison officials tried to start intravenous lines by using at least seven needles on Pike’s arm. “One needle was bent in a 90-degree angle when it was removed,” a defence filing states. While receiving the two doses, “she could be heard crying, whimpering and breathing loudly throughout the procedure”, her lawyers said.

Under Tennessee’s lethal injection protocol, if the person remains alive five minutes after receiving a first dose of the pentobarbital injection, a second injection is to be administered - but the execution protocol does not say what should happen if the person remains alive after that. This was actually the second failed execution this year in Tennessee involving the same doctor in both cases. When the execution of Tony Carruthers failed, he was then granted a one-year reprieve - after which they will attempt to kill him again.

James Crowson, part of Pike’s defence team, says he was not surprised that Tennessee botched its execution attempt, because attorneys had warned that the procedure was dangerous and potentially cruel - a number of defence filings stated quite clearly that she had “compromised” veins.¹ Crowson also said accounts that officials had followed the written protocol, but the execution was badly mishandled, are not necessarily contradictory, for the simple reason that states that impose the death penalty “don’t really include medicine or science in the discussions, when they’re coming up with these protocols”.

As a result of this gruesome incident, Tennessee’s top prison official, Frank Strada - the commissioner of the Tennessee department of correction - is stepping down later this month, as this was the fifth failed execution attempt carried out under his watch. The state has launched an independent investigation into what went wrong, as the authorities have not yet offered any explanations, but there is a strong possibility that, apart from being incorrectly administered, the pentobarbital was degraded due to factors including poor manufacturing or improper storage - factors about which experts had previously expressed concern.

Grotesque

What happened to Christa Pike is a blatant violation of the constitutional prohibition on “cruel and unusual” punishment. Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, said that it was time to turn around the “threshold question”, so that, instead of asking whether a prisoner deserved to die for the crime committed, the question should be, “Do our governments which tolerate inequality, unreliability and bias deserve to kill?”²

In a grotesque spectacle, death penalty states are scrambling to find alternatives to the lethal injection, which was supposed to be the ‘humane’ alternative to a firing squad or electric chair - at the time they were portrayed as an ‘improvement’ on hanging in a system disproportionately handing the death penalty to black men.

But inevitably, these alternatives turn out to be no better, if not worse. Alabama briefly tried using an ‘experimental’ procedure using nitrogen gas - one that vets refuse to use as a method for the euthanasia of cats and dogs - but it was blocked in June by a federal judge, ruling that it was an example of “cruel and unusual punishment”. Other states have opted for the firing squad, but recent executions this way have been dogged by bullets missing the heart, to the extent that the suggestion has been raised that some of the mis-targeted shots may have been intentional - which would not be surprising.

The last time that the US saw a moratorium on executions was in 1972, when the supreme court ruled in the landmark criminal case, Furman v Georgia, that capital punishment was “capricious and arbitrary” and hence violated the eighth and 14th amendments prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment.³ When Pike was sentenced to death in 1996 at the age of 20, that made her one of the youngest women to receive a death sentence in the US during the post-Furman period. Although the justices did not rule that the death penalty per se was unconstitutional, the Furman decision invalidated the death sentences of nearly 700 people. But the ban was lifted four years later.

Paradoxically, calls for a renewed nationwide pause are reaching fever pitch at precisely the time that pressure to carry out executions is also peaking - which was only to be expected, given Donald Trump’s enthusiasm for the death penalty, repeatedly exhorting various states, as well as the federal department of justice, to speed up judicial killings. Last year saw the highest number of US executions (47 across 12 states) in 16 years, via in particular a resurgence of firing squads, despite medical experts condemning them as “excruciating”. But Trump probably regards that as a bonus.

Cheerleaders

What do Britain’s death-penalty cheerleaders have to say about Christa Pike?⁴ This is the pertinent question raised by Maya Foa, head of the human rights charity Reprieve.⁵ Restore Britain has promised to hold a binding referendum on the death penalty, Rupert Lowe arguing in PMQs last year that it was needed for cases where “the evil” is “so irredeemable”, and far more importantly, was “far too often perpetrated by someone who should not be in our country to begin with”.⁶ Lee Anderson, the totally obnoxious Reform MP and former Labour councillor, is also in favour of a referendum, convinced that the public would vote in favour of the death penalty. Historically, of course, there has always been a baying ‘pro-hanging’ mob amongst the Tory rank and file.

Britain abolished the death penalty for murder in 1965 after the outcry that followed a fatal miscarriage of justice, when Timothy Evans was hanged for murdering his wife and daughter - but they were actually both victims of the serial killer, John Christie, who lived downstairs. Ruth Ellis, the last woman executed in the Britain in 1955, was punched, pushed down the stairs and threatened with murder by the man she shot dead outside a now famous London pub - similar to the hideous treatment meted out to the teenage Christa Pike. And there is clear evidence, whatever the right might say, that capital punishment does not deter crime: in 2024, of the eight most violent states in the US measured by the murder rate, seven had the death penalty.

But, regardless, in April the US department of justice published a Trumpian death penalty report that brazenly claimed that all methods of execution available to US states are ‘humane’ - a truly sick and perverse finding despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary going back decades. Proponents of capital punishment, like Rupert Lowe, often claim that it will be reserved for the “worst of the worst” mass murderers, but consistent research shows that in reality the death penalty is actually disproportionately reserved for the most vulnerable - including people with mental illness and intellectual disability, or people who cannot afford good lawyers. In fact, people like Timothy Evans and Christa Pike.

Tony Blair infamously promised to be “tough on crime and the causes of crime”, but we always knew what he meant by that - dishing out more punishment and punitive treatment. But we have always stressed that crime can only be understood in relation to the given society. As we live in a class society, anti-social crime is mainly a product of alienation, want or resistance - and the ‘justice system’, reflecting the balance of class forces, essentially aims to beat the population into submission. For us, however, the aim must always be rehabilitation - not punishment or revenge, let alone cruelty. In a society of freely associated producers, prisons would be just a memory, something found in history books.

Our history

As we state in the CPGB Draft programme (3.17. ‘Crime and prison’), under capitalism “property is considered primary; the person merely a form of property”.⁷ We know that far too many people are unnecessarily in prison, especially given that a high proportion of prisoners lack basic literacy skills, have mental health issues or suffer from an alcohol or drug problem. Therefore we say that prisoners “must be allowed the maximum opportunity to develop themselves as human beings” and thus “should only be imprisoned within a short distance of their home locality” (if not, families must be given the full cost of travel for visits). Centrally, prison life “must be made as near normal as possible”, like having the right to vote in elections, etc.

Of course, here we simply follow in the footsteps of the socialist movement. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels certainly took it for granted that the death penalty was archaic and had to go. The Socialist International ran aggressive campaigns against the death penalty. In that spirit the programme of the Russian Social Democratic Party demanded the “abolition of the death penalty”. However, and this is important, that was not an absolute position. The party opposed tsarist executions, but refused to tie the hands of the future in dealing with tsarist counterrevolutionaries.

Nonetheless, one of the first acts of the Bolshevik government on November 8 was the abolition decree. However, it was restored as an “exceptional measure” during the civil war, but there was always the promise that this would be temporary. Indeed the death penalty was abolished in January 1920 … only to be restored in May 1920 with the outbreak of war with Poland.

By the late 1920s expediency had became the norm … and we all know what happened after that. There is a lesson here.