An advocate for the abolition of the death penalty has said that America was ‘so close’ to getting things in place for possibly getting rid of it before Donald Trump became president.
Christa Pike’s botched execution has brought more attention on the death penalty in the US, as she received a double dose of lethal injection drugs but did not die.
She was rushed to hospital and life-saving measures were performed on her, with her lawyers saying she is now conscious and speaking.
Human rights activist Judi Caruso told LADbible it was ‘so cruel and really almost surrealistic’.
“It’s hard to imagine that any civilised society could inflict this kind of pain and suffering on a human being,” she said of the bizarre and ‘Kafkaesque’ situation where the state of Tennessee was trying to kill Pike but also had to save her life after the botched execution.
“Because my bottom line is we shouldn’t be killing people anyways, period, all the way across the board, but this is just one part of an incredibly broken system for those who look at the death penalty.”
Human rights advocate Judi Caruso warned that Trump’s election set back the cause of abolishing the death penalty (Instagram/@judicaruso)
“We were so close… until Trump came into power”
Following Pike’s failed execution, Tennessee has paused death sentences for the rest of the year.
But elsewhere in the US, plans are still going ahead and in a macabre turn there are plans to make an execution public.
US defence secretary Pete Hegseth said the execution of Nidal Malik Hasan, which is scheduled for December, would be something ‘people are able to watch’.
Trump had initially voiced his support for live-streaming the execution, but later reversed his decision as he said ‘many very good and well meaning people would rather not watch him die’.
He said: “I think streaming the execution for all to see might have been a strong deterrent for the World to witness how America deals with Terrorists and SCUM like Hasan.
“He will die, as scheduled, by firing squad, but this event will not be streamed.”
US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth said there were plans to livestream an execution (Jim WATSON / AFP via Getty Images)
The death penalty won’t be abolished for ‘several decades to come’
Caruso said efforts to halt the death penalty in the US would likely take ‘many, many several decades to come now’ because of the election of Donald Trump as president.
She said: “We were so close to getting five votes on that Supreme Court until Trump came into power. He replaced [Anthony] Kennedy, for example, Kennedy would have been that fifth vote. Kennedy retired.
“Of course, he gets replaced with an ultra far right judge. And now we’re in a position where we’re not going to be able to judicially abolish the death penalty for many, many, several decades to come now.
“Unfortunately, we’re back to thinking of state by state.”
She said the current state of affairs was ‘very demoralising for us activists’ who hoped the day the Supreme Court would find the death penalty violated the eighth amendment, which bans cruel and unusual punishments.
“That exoneration issue… has been absolutely critical”
Caruso said that the pause on executions was ‘a good stepping stone’ for Tennessee to use the case of Christa Pike as an example and widen the debate from the lethal injection protocol to whether the death penalty should stand.
Caruso also argued that the death penalty doesn’t ‘deter crimes any more effectively than, for example, life without the possibility of parole which is the alternative’.
Death penalty in the US is a state by state issue, with 23 states having abolished it, another 23 carrying out executions and four where the death penalty still stands but a moratorium has been placed on executions.
The death penalty exists in many US states (Getty Stock)
Then there’s the many cases of exoneration where people are on death row only to be proven innocent.
Caruso’s partner Juan Roberto Melendez-Colon is one of these, he spent years on death row in Florida with the electric chair awaiting him before he was proven innocent.
“That exoneration issue, the innocence issue, has been absolutely critical in abolition of the death penalty throughout the United States,” the human rights activist said.
In each state which had abolished the death penalty Caruso said the argument of prisoners being found innocent before they were sent to the execution chamber had been ‘absolutely critical every time’.
Nidal Hasan is due to be executed in December, and Trump walked back the decision to livestream it after criticism (Bell County Sheriff’s Office via Getty Images)
“We should get rid of it altogether”
Discussing the matter of the death penalty, Caruso said that the practical argument for keeping it was ‘so irreparably damaged that we should get rid of it altogether’.
She said: “It is significantly more expensive to maintain the death penalty system than to have the alternative in the United States, which is life without the possibility of parole for the most serious of murders.
“If you’re looking at it from a law and order perspective and we know that it doesn’t deter crimes any more effectively than, for example, life without the possibility of parole which is the alternative.
“It is just not effective in terms of deterring crime so it doesn’t make us safer, that money that could be saved by getting rid of the death penalty could absolutely be used for more effective violence prevention.
“Again, if you’re looking at the death penalty from a practical perspective it makes no sense.”
LADbible contacted the White House for comment.
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