Christa Pike Death Penalty Fiasco Calls Attention to High Cost of Executions in America

Six days after Tennessee tried and failed to execute her, Christa Pike woke up in a Nashville hospital bed. Her attorneys said last week that Pike, 50, was conscious and speaking, calling her recovery medically unprecedented. Still, her prognosis is unclear, and they expect a long road back.The state is paying for every hour of her care, and the Department of Correction hasn’t said what it costs; it could take up to four months for it to respond to a records request. Intensive care estimates, however, typically run up to $6,000 per day, and that is before you add extra hospital security to the tab.Even without a failed lethal injection, a capital case costs far more than a life sentence. The harder questions are how much more, who pays and whether the public knows what it is buying.Why is the state spending anything to save a woman it set out to kill? The answer is legal. Tennessee law requires an execution to follow a prescribed process at the prison, so ending her life support in a hospital would not count as one. The Supreme Court has held since 1976 that prisons must provide inmates medical care, and the American Medical Association bars physicians from taking part in executions.The attorney general’s office told a court this week that no new execution order is pending, though it has not ruled out seeking one. Her condition could decide whether it can.“Her case is very unusual,” the Milton Underwood professor of law at Vanderbilt University, Christopher Slobogin, tells The New York Sun. “And if she has suffered brain injury, the state will be barred from trying to execute her again because she will be incompetent to be executed, so that care may be necessary for a long time.”Four Billion Dollars for Thirteen ExecutionsThe hospital stay is an unplanned entry on a ledger that studies say was lopsided long before the failed execution. The most cited analysis comes from California, where a federal appeals judge, Arthur Alarcón, and a Loyola Law School professor, Paula Mitchell, found in 2011 that the state’s system had cost taxpayers about $4 billion more since 1978 than one in which life without parole was the harshest penalty. It carried out 13 executions during that span.Tennessee’s comptroller concluded in 2004 that capital trials cost 48 percent more than trials in which prosecutors sought life, while conceding that thin record-keeping made a full accounting impossible. A 2016 Susquehanna University study found death row inmates cost on average $1.12 million more than those in the general population.Mr. Slobogin points out that “people can spend well over a decade on death row, which costs more than being housed in the general prison population.”That wait, and thus the cost, has lengthened sharply. The average time from sentencing to execution rose from 11.4 years in 2000 to 18.9 years in 2020, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, as appeals multiplied and many judges faced no deadline to respond. Kirk Bloodsworth became the first death row prisoner exonerated by DNA in 1993, and the Death Penalty Information Center counts at least 203 exonerations from death row since 1973.The expense falls unevenly. County taxpayers carry the added cost of security and longer pretrial detention, and small counties feel it most. Mohave County, Arizona, set aside about $330,000 in 2016 for two capital trials, and a supervisor there warned that a death penalty trial can consume a rural county’s entire budget.Not everyone accepts the studies.“Whenever someone cites a study involving the death penalty, the first question to ask is whether the study was done by an opponent of the death penalty,” the legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, Kent Scheidegger, tells the Sun. “It is trivially easy to skew a study to produce the result one wants.”Mr. Scheidegger asks whether the studies count the savings from the fact that “far more murderers plead guilty and receive life sentences in states with the death penalty.”Prosecutors are doing their own math.“We have seen the lowest numbers of death sentences in decades, causing prosecutors and communities to ask why bear the expense of these trials that usually result in losses,” a professor of law and the director of the Wilson Center for Science and Justice at Duke University School of Law, Brandon Garrett, tells the Sun. Mr. Garrett adds that “most death sentences that are imposed are reversed.”Cost has not stopped legislatures from pressing ahead.“Some legislators also believe that no penalty other than death is proportionate to first-degree capital murder,” Mr. Slobogin explains.Washington Is Restarting the MachineThe same math now confronts the federal government, which is rebuilding a death penalty system that President Biden largely emptied by commuting 37 of 40 federal death sentences. President Trump signed an executive order on his first day back in office directing prosecutors to seek death in cases of sufficient severity, and his first administration carried out 13 federal executions.Attorney General Pam Bondi, since fired, told prosecutors in February 2025 to seek death wherever possible, and her successor, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, has kept going. By one tally, the administration has already brought more death penalty prosecutions than in all of Mr. Trump’s first term.No federal civilian execution has taken place since January 2021; however, in April the Justice Department released a report restoring the first-term lethal injection protocol, adding the firing squad and directing the Bureau of Prisons to consider electrocution and gas. On Tuesday, Mr. Trump approved the Army’s first execution by firing squad since World War II.Every one of those cases carries the costs the state studies describe.“Each federal capital trial and execution is likely to cost millions more than less high-profile cases,” Mr. Slobogin continues. “In Maryland the execution of five people cost the state $186 million, and researchers concluded that the death sentencing process cost over 40 percent more than a process in which a life sentence is the ultimate punishment.”Others see the price as beside the point.“Relative to the size of the federal budget, a drop in the ocean,” Mr. Scheidegger explains. On whether cost should drive the decision, he says, “Cost isn’t the point. The death penalty is for justice and deterrence. It is not for saving money.”Back in Tennessee, Governor Bill Lee ordered a third-party review of Pike’s failed execution and halted the other execution set for this year. Pike was convicted of the 1995 torture killing of Colleen Slemmer, a fellow Job Corps student at Knoxville. She was 18.A physician who consulted on Pike’s case before the attempted execution says the dollar figure is the wrong place to start.“We are willing to pay enormous amounts for certain things, and some people refuse to leave a tip on a 10 dollar food tab,” an anesthesiologist and intensive care physician, Dr. Joel Zivot, tells the Sun. “The real question is if whatever the cost, does the public want it?”

Christa Pike Death Penalty Fiasco Calls Attention to High Cost of Executions in America

Christa Pike Death Penalty Fiasco Calls Attention to High Cost of Executions in America

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