Justice is out of Balance

Photo AI-generated depicting justice out of balance.

I have spent much of my life thinking about death, not in the abstract, but in the way the state prepares to take a human life in the name of justice. For two decades, I worked as a criminal defense lawyer in Georgia. When I closed my practice, I had successfully defended five Black men from execution in the Georgia electric chair, the capital punishment method in use in the last century. I fought those cases hard because I did not want to stand inside the execution chamber in Jackson, Georgia. And for all those years, I never did, not until I went as a layman to protest the execution of Troy Davis on September 11, 2011, a moment that still sits heavy on my spirit. In nine days, Troy Davis would have turned 59 years old.

I have been a lifelong opponent of capital punishment. Only once did I ever believe the death penalty might be morally justified. It was in the Dylann Roof case, where Roof murdered 15 members of a Bible study group at the Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 15, 2015. The church had invited him in for solace. Even then, I felt the weight of the question, not the righteousness of the answer.

Tonight, as I read the NBC News report on Tennessee’s failed execution of Christa Gail Pike, I am troubled in a way that reaches back through every capital case I ever handled.

Because what Tennessee attempted was not an execution. It was a collapse of state power. Simply put, a process the state could not control.

The facts are stark. Witnesses reported that executioners injected both syringes of lethal injection chemicals, yet Pike “has not lost consciousness and still has a heartbeat.” Journalists heard her say, “My arm feels like it’s about to burst open” at 7:34 p.m. They saw her kicking her feet, snoring, and knocking off the sheets laid on her body. At times, the curtain was closed, and journalists could only hear sounds.

Twice, officials closed the curtains, hiding the process from public view.

An ambulance arrived at the prison and then left again as medical aid was administered inside the death chamber. Even the victim’s mother, who wanted the execution carried out, said simply: “It was a mess.”

This was Tennessee’s second failed execution this year. In May, executioners could not find a vein for Tony Carruthers, forcing a one‑year reprieve.

When a state cannot reliably carry out its gravest punishment, the punishment itself becomes morally indefensible. I have seen this system from the inside. I defended men the state intended to kill. I sat in rooms where prosecutors spoke casually about death. I sat with families who feared the phone call that would end their world. I sat with clients failed by every institution long before they ever met me. I saw the relief in their eyes when death was taken off the table. In 2011, I felt the collective weight of protesters who had waited all day for a phone call from Justice Clarence Thomas that could save Troy Davis’s life. I’m still haunted by the collective murmur that erupted in the crowd when Ben Jealous announced that Thomas denied Davis’s last appeal, then Raphael Warnock emerged from the death chamber with the words, it is finished.

I also sat in policy discussions when Georgia considered eliminating electrocution in favor of lethal injection. We argued that capital punishment was cruel and unusual under all circumstances. The prevailing argument then was that lethal injection would be “more humane,” “more predictable,” and “less traumatic” for everyone involved.

But the Pike attempt shows what I suspected even then: the state cannot guarantee a humane death, not with electricity, not with chemicals, and not with any method that relies on human hands, human judgment, and human fallibility. As the Pike case shows, the body does not always cooperate.

The state’s spokesperson insisted Tennessee “followed every step of the State’s lawful, established execution. They insisted Tennessee “followed every step of the State’s lawful, established execution protocol” and that the chemical “has consistently been effective.”

But the human body is not a protocol. It is not a machine. It does not always respond to chemicals the way the state expects.

When Pike remained conscious, breathing, and in pain after both syringes were administered, the state’s claim of “consistency” collapsed.

Let’s be clear, trauma cannot be separated from the process. Pike’s lawyers argued that being strapped down would trigger “severe mental suffering and superadded psychological terror” because she had been molested and raped beginning in early childhood: trauma the state did not dispute at a recent hearing.

Even if the chemicals had worked perfectly, the psychological harm was already built into the process. A humane execution is impossible when the process itself recreates the trauma that shaped the defendant’s life.

Here is the moral question we cannot avoid.

I defended men the state intended to kill because I believed, and still believe, that the death penalty is a power too great for any government to wield. It requires perfection from inherently imperfect institutions. It requires certainty from systems built on human judgment. It requires control over a process that cannot be fully controlled.

The Pike attempt proves this again. If the state cannot kill cleanly, it should not kill at all.

When I stood outside the prison in Jackson to protest the execution of Troy Davis, I felt the weight of every client I had ever defended. I felt the weight of every mistake the justice system has ever made. And I felt the weight of the question that has followed me my entire career:

What does it do to a society when the state kills in its name?

Tonight, Tennessee answered that question in the worst possible way. It showed us that the death penalty is not justice. It is not closure. It is not control. It is a system that fails publicly, painfully, and predictably.

When the state fails at killing, everyone involved carries the burden: the condemned, the victims’ families, the witnesses, the courts, and the society that allows it. I have spent my life fighting this system. Tonight reminds me why.

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When the State Cannot Kill Cleanly