RON HART: Democracy and the Death Penalty: One Man, One Volt

When asked about the death penalty, some are surprised to hear me say that I am against the electric chair. It is because we wait so long with so many on death row; I am for electric chairs until we catch up. Until then, all the murderers we have yet to execute should get their last meals buffet-style.

The State of Tennessee spent thirty-one years getting ready to execute Christa Pike and then, on the night it really mattered? An epic fail. Pike, 50, was supposed to become the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than two centuries. Talk about your DEI when it comes to our executions: ‘You’ve come a long way, baby!’

Pike murdered her classmate, Colleen Slemmer, in Knoxville in 1995. She’s been in the slammer since she murdered Slemmer; the courts had finished with her. The governor had declined to intervene. The U.S. Supreme Court had cleared the lane. All that remained was for the Department of Corrections to do one job, but it could not.

Thirty-one years of us paying $80k a year for her incarceration ($2.4 mil), and probably a like amount for her lawyers to appeal. Stupid.

Christa Pike’s lethal injection attempt failed after two doses, resulting in her hospitalization. For the record, the government shot of three different lethal drugs did not work. As it stands now, more women have died in Tennessee from the Covid shot than by lethal injection death penalty execution.

Women are tough. My friends in Los Angeles were not surprised that a woman lived through two lethal injections. But people in Beverly Hills point out that a single Kardashian has survived thousands of injections of poisonous Botox and fat into her lips.

Public attention has been conveniently shifted away from Pike’s victim. She murdered her classmate in what the Knoxville Police Chief described as the “worst crime scene” in his 34 years, resulting in lasting traumatic memories for law enforcement involved.

They should have used a firing squad. The left would say that is “cruel and unusual punishment” and should not be carried out. But this is America, and most of the left are in big, blue-run cities. What is more usual than getting shot in one of those?

If the state could not handle this, they should have just let her loose in parts of Memphis, and her punishment would have been carried out, street style.

But now, in the eyes of liberals against the death penalty, she is the victim. They do not want to talk about her heinous crime or about the reason she did it. What does that matter? Did the other girl wear the same dress to school, get the same haircut?

Governor Bill Lee ordered a third-party review and paused the other execution still on the calendar. The protocol is secret enough that the public cannot inspect the parts that failed. She might just sue. And the law here is untested, as it also does not say what the state owes a person it has already tried to kill twice.

While her legal status remains questionable, Ms. Pike was allowed to update her Facebook status to “almost executed.”

The review will take forever with a government bureaucracy. Expect the report to be a word salad of nothingness, with phrases like “deviation from the norm,” “lack of training,” “capacity restraints,” and “appropriate measures to ensure.”

I know she is busy with the Cornell 7 case, but Gov. Lee should let NYAG Letitia James investigate. It most certainly would end with Trump being indicted for something.

It has been so long since we executed murderers that this generation of kids finds it shocking. In conservative Utah, Charlie Kirk’s 22-year-old shooter, Tyler Robinson, should also get the death penalty. Robinson may be the first member of the lazy Generation Z to face a possible death penalty. He could get the electric couch.

According to Pew Research, two-thirds of Americans are for the death penalty. The only mitigating factor is a New York case saying you cannot execute someone with a 59 IQ. So AOC is safe.

Liberal states like California won’t use the death penalty. To execute someone in California, making them “pay the ultimate price,” you’d have to cancel their podcast or serve them something with gluten in it.

A libertarian op-ed humorist and award-winning author, Ron does commentary on radio and TV. He can be contacted at [email protected] or @RonaldHart on Twitter.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.