We Must Move Beyond the Era of State-Sponsored, State-Celebrated Murder

This story was co-published with Truthout.

Christa Pike woke up on October 6 in a Tennessee hospital with a blood clot and pneumonia, handcuffed and shackled to her bed, having become the first known person to survive an execution via lethal injection. On September 30, the state of Tennessee tried to murder Pike. Instead, it put her through an hour and a half of difficulty breathing as she intermittently gasped for air and was eventually sent into critical condition, in a notoriously “botched execution” — in other words, torture. As Sandra Babcock, one of Pike’s attorneys, put it on Democracy Now: “Christa Pike … has just experienced the most agonizing attempt at lethal injection in the country’s history.”

Conversations in the wake of this torture have, understandably, focused on the exceptional circumstances of the attempted killing. However, this is also an important moment to recognize the depths of brutality in which this country wallows, such that the killing of a person by their own government only tends to make front page news when it is “botched.” It is also a key time to push ourselves to imagine beyond that violence, and to ask: What kind of world can we build, in which an execution is unthinkable?

First, we must contend with the extent of our status-quo brutality. This vicious, not-so-new normal is illustrated by the fact that in the end, Pike’s attorneys, who fought persistently for her sentence to be commuted, were forced to argue for her to be hanged, as Pike rightly predicted that her small veins would make lethal injection a long and terrifyingly painful process. Let that sink in: We live in a country where mercy is a hanging.

Death penalty proponents have responded to Pike’s survival by advocating even harsher methods. U.S. Senator and Tennessee gubernatorial candidate Marsha Blackburn responded, “The answer is simple: Bring back the electric chair and deliver justice for these victims swiftly.” (Multiple state supreme courts have ruled the electric chair to be cruel and unusual punishment, citing examples like six-inch flames erupting from the head of an electrocution victim.) Tennessee State House Speaker Cameron Sexton said, “I don’t think there’s any method that’s off the table at this point.” And in a cameo that should shock no one, Former Deputy Assistant Attorney John Yoo, infamous for authoring the Torture Memos, said on Fox News, “Tennessee is trying to use what is considered the most humane method of capital punishment, which is lethal injection. The court has allowed, and Tennessee could use, far more … hurtful, you know, methods like firing squad.”

These pro-cruelty statements mark a chilling counter-trend regarding the death penalty. Throughout the early 21^st century, thanks to the efforts of an enduring anti-death penalty movement, executions significantly declined, pharmaceutical companies fled the execution-drug market, and medical professionals overwhelmingly refused to participate in executions.

These shifts, of course, never went far enough, and states’ insistence that the alternative must be a lifelong prison sentence — death by incarceration, as dedicated organizers have termed it — has ingrained the use of endless punishment, marking another uphill battle.

Yet even these changes are on thin ice. The last two years have witnessed a pronounced resurgence of executions. In the U.S., more people were killed by the state in 2025 than in any year since 2009. And by July of this year, Trump had already begun more capital prosecutions than he’d launched in his whole first term in office. This week, Trump approved the first U.S. military execution in more than 60 years, and the Pentagon plans to livestream it.

Throughout his second presidency, Trump has pushed the death penalty both rhetorically and policy-wise, beginning with his day one executive order, which claimed that “only capital punishment can bring justice and restore order” in relation to “the vilest crimes.” In a memo in April of this year, Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) called on Congress to broaden and accelerate use of the federal death penalty. And in a report released by the DOJ’s Office of Legal Policy, then-Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche muses in Orwellian fashion that “death, more than any other punishment, communicates the immeasurable value of innocent human life.”

This pro-death penalty fervor is part of a current of unabashed glorification of state violence that courses through the Trump era, from the president’s genocidal threat to Iran via social media (“a whole civilization will die tonight”), to his boasting about the “stunning” and “spectacular” operation that captured Nicolas Maduro and murdered dozens of Venezuelan and Cuban people, to his ongoing funneling of weapons to Israel’s genocide while describing Gaza as a “demolition site” to be transformed into real estate, to his administration’s insistence amid rampant ICE violence that raids “haven’t gone far enough.”

The brutality is the point. The torture is the point. The murder, not only state-sanctioned but state-celebrated, is the very point.

But it’s not just Trump, and it’s not just Republicans. A Pew Research Center survey in August 2026 showed that general support for the death penalty has risen six points in the last five years. Fifty-one percent of Democrats still support the death penalty, and that number increases to 62 percent for “conservative and moderate Democrats.” More broadly, Democrats are moving to portray themselves as being “tougher on crime” — that is, more enthusiastic about inflicting state violence on oppressed communities — and in fact, centrist Democrats have supported a return to actively “tough-on-crime” rhetoric in the past couple of years. Such rhetoric blatantly upholds prisons, policing, surveillance, and other carceral technologies as the keys to “safety.”

Meanwhile, even many liberal Democrats cling to the apparatus of capturing and caging human beings, while arguing that it should be done “humanely.” It’s carceral humanism: an oxymoronic insistence that locking someone in a cell and denying their humanity can be a compassionate act. Although many of these same Democrats oppose the death penalty, the arguments for “humane” prisons and policing echo the chorus of voices calling for “humane” executions. If only women’s prisons offered “gender-responsive” counseling and “homelike” cooking areas, locking them in cages would be acceptable. If only police wore body cameras, the mass surveillance and capture of human beings would be acceptable. If only the poison would work more quickly, killing humans in all of our names would be acceptable. Republican death penalty hardliners and Democratic pro-prison soft-liners sometimes behave like two sides of the same coin.

In fact, as Victoria Law and I argue in our book Prison by Any Other Name, “When captivity is perceived as kinder and gentler, it becomes more acceptable and less of an urgent priority to confront, even though it continues to destroy countless lives.”

From the firing squad to the solitary cell, the carceral system operates through “human sacrifice,” as Ruth Wilson Gilmore puts it: “The power to put humans in cages also derives from the power to kill — not only by way of the ritualized punishment of the death penalty, but also by life sentences, as well as the ritual of serially excused police killings that transformed #BlackLivesMatter from a lament to a movement.”

The death penalty revival, and the wider ecosystem of criminalization rhetoric and policy in which it lives, is symptomatic of a larger, sharply cynical abandonment of life-affirming values and practices. This abandonment rides alongside a scary and losing strategy among some Democrats of moving to the center in an attempt to win elections. Even some of those who are not overtly espousing “moderation” are distancing themselves from the important movements to defund the police and defend Black lives, as witnessed by recent statements from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani. Liberal Democrats who disparage “woke 1” (as Ocasio-Cortez dubbed the 2020 uprising era) are choosing to endorse the myth that state violence is an irrevocable feature of our society, and that it is “crazy” to imagine otherwise.

In reality, as Alec Karakatsanis explains, there is broad public backing for policies that shift resources away from police and prisons and toward material care and support. Yet many Democrats persist in their absolute fealty to the punishment system. Even if we succeed in reeling in the death penalty’s most brutal applications, will we be satisfied to continue relegating millions of people to the status of the living dead?

Moreover, we should remember that in these repressive times, prisons, policing, surveillance, and other forms of state violence are the cudgel by which authoritarianism is maintained. If we offer cover for the carceral system, framing real attempts to oppose it as “going too far,” we are propping up the vehicles for Trump-era repression, whether we intend to or not.

So, if our path is not deadly “moderation,” what might it be? Some Democrats’ revisionist portrayals of the defund movement — and of the wider struggle for abolition — erase one of its most crucial messages, which is to ask us all: What do we want? If we divest from police, what do we invest in? If we have the resources, what do we create? How do we make those decisions together? What are people already doing to create these new presents and futures, and how can we build on that work?

If we look clearly at the conversations of 2020 and 2021, we can see that there’s a reason why so-called “woke 1” resonated so profoundly with a massive swath of people worldwide: Instead of assuming the inevitability of racist, lethal systems, from the death penalty to police violence to solitary confinement and beyond, it offered an agenda that valued and affirmed life.

As Christa Pike languishes in the hospital and more executions loom in the coming weeks (including Lisa Jo Chamberlin, whose co-defendant confessed he coerced her into their crime), we must dig in and commit to opposing this state violence. And we must also ask ourselves: What is our life-affirming agenda, a vision that condemns death penalties of all kinds?

A cohesive life-affirming agenda rejects not only executions, but also the inherent violence of incarceration, policing, deportation, imperial wars, and military aid to genocidal forces. It makes no excuses — let alone expansions — that prop up or prolong the existence of these institutions in “kinder, gentler” forms. A cohesive life-affirming agenda unequivocally and vocally opposes bans on gender-affirming care and other attacks on trans people, recognizing that these policies are literally deadly. Such an agenda would also unequivocally and vocally oppose bans on abortion, which have been both killing pregnant people outright and also squelching their autonomy to choose the life they actually want. Such an agenda would recognize the urgency of ending gender-based violence, and comprehend the intersections of state and interpersonal violence for so many marginalized communities. It would recognize that — as Jewish Voice for Peace reminds us in calling for an end to Israel’s genocide, occupation, and colonization of Palestine — “every person is an entire world, and every death is a world extinguished.”

A life-affirming agenda would also spur us to ask, in the words of one of my favorite children’s books: What are you for?

When we open up space for this conversation, the possibilities abound — with the common thread of resourcing and nurturing life on Earth. Issues normally thought of as “siloed” converge: good housing for all, free health care for all, bodily autonomy in all realms, racial justice, gender justice, economic justice, environmental justice, food justice, access to the arts and libraries and recreational opportunities, and new and generative ways of relating to each other and to the land.

We start to look at the “one million experiments” through which communities are already pursuing real collective safety, and we realize we do not have to imagine from scratch: People are doing the work, and so much more can be done if we all see ourselves as active participants in this transformation. As Mariame Kaba and Andrea Ritchie write in No More Police, “It will take all of us to dismantle death-making institutions, change the ways we understand and relate to each other, and build safer and more just communities without them.”

That sounds like a cohesive life-affirming agenda to me. Another name for it? Abolition.

“Abolition is not absence, it is presence,” Gilmore says in a 2018 interview with The Funambulist. “What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities. So those who feel in their gut deep anxiety that abolition means knock it all down, scorch the earth and start something new, let that go. Abolition is building the future from the present, in all of the ways we can.”

This reminder feels especially important amid the rise of generative AI, the intensification of the climate crisis, and the current federal administration’s burn-it-all-down mentality toward so much of what is good about the world. The notion that we can still build — that a livable future is possible, and that our own actions play a role in making it happen — is key to imagining beyond the death-making status quo.

Let’s not allow ourselves to give in to the inertia of our brutal present, in which death by hanging is a mercy. Let’s envision the cohesive, life-affirming agenda that embraces a future for all of us, a world in which the torture of Christa Pike — or anyone — is unthinkable.