Well, I believe there was a case in England where a woman was sentenced to death by hanging for killing her child. She was hanged and appeared dead, but when they cut her down after some time she came back to life. In her case it was considered she had endured her punishment and she was released. Public called her half hanged Mary(?). Not sure about her name anymore. But I'm sure long common law history is only employed when convenient.

Somewhere a dystopian sci-fi describes a justice system where you can receive multiple life sentences and actually serve them all. Upon a natural death, you are revived and renewed to the age you were at sentencing to serve the next life sentence. Only after completing them all are you free to die and remain that way.

The rich and powerful use their sway to prolong the sentences of those that have wronged them. Died early from an aggressive cancer? Well upon renewal they bribed the system to cure you of that. Or they implant a disease that won't kill you sooner but makes your time even worse.

Okay, no no no.

I'm going to illustrate something here, and I hope it makes sense. Please humor me:

Hypothetically, imagine a father, and he has a beautiful daughter. Now, as difficult as it is, just imagine that she's kidnapped and brutally murdered, and he KNOWS who did it. The only ones in the whole world who knew it were the child's father and the police. But for some reason, the (hypothetical) police didn't do anything. The killer would remain free.

No matter what we think about such a situation, I think most people could sympathize with the father, and if the father decided to get revenge, people would at least understand it, maybe even find the father not guilty if he were ever put on trial. A father's love for his child, and what had been done would justify his feelings. Understandable.

But in this hypothetical scenario, it wouldn't mean that just anyone would be justified for wanting to kill the murderer, if they didn't know the killer was a murderer. If someone just happened to kill the child's murderer for no reason and had no idea that the child's murderer had killed her, no one would say that this second killer had standing to justify killing that person.

To come back to the Christa Pike case, the death penalty can be debated, and there are honestly reasonable arguments on both sides of that case.

But failed executions are unacceptable. In any context. There should NEVER be a situation where the government takes an action to kill someone and fails to do it. The result of such a thing is INHERENTLY cruel and unusual punishment. It maims people, tortures them, et cetera. The fact that this could happen to someone who is a killer means it could happen to other people. And we know for a fact that innocent people have been put to death before, so a government that would have a failed execution and would still want to kill the person is a government that has announced that a failed execution is an option for that government. That it has the ability to commit that kind of cruel and unusual punishment against someone and then to do it again.

Government justifies its continued existence through the ethics of its actions. When someone has committed murder, it's at least understandable that a given government would want to end the life of the murderer. Whether you or I or anyone else like the death penalty, it at least makes sense to want that.

The problem is that when that government fails to execute someone, the government itself is failing its first test. The test which justifies the government getting to continue to be government. At the point that a government is committing cruel and unusual punishment, for some reason, I lose interest in the question of whether a single convicted murderer deserves to die(and personally, I believe that answer is yes), but I become a whole lot more interested in why a government which has announced its intentions to have cruel and unusual punishment is now the one to ask questions about whether others should be punished in this way.

I have trouble focusing on whether a government should kill a given criminal when the government asking the question has the power to kill that person but itself lacks the ethical justification to be the one asking to do so.