There is no such thing as a clean execution
There are times when the absence of Jonathan Swift is acutely felt. One such moment came at the end of last month with the botched execution of a woman in Tennessee called Christa Pike. Pike has been in prison on death row since 1996 when she was convicted of the torture and murder of a classmate when she was just 18. She had originally been sentenced to death by electric chair. But society has become more benevolent since the 1990s and so, at the age of 50, Pike was prepared for execution by lethal injection. If society sanctions the ultimate punishment, it should not look away from what that punishment looks like The injections went ahead but they did not work.
