A free pass earned?

Christa Pike was 18 when she and her boyfriend beat up and killed 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer at a job training camp in Tennessee. Slemmer’s body was found with a pentagram carved into her chest.

Pike was convicted, sentenced to death, and spent more than two decades on death row. She is not an easy person to sympathize with, even after Tennessee botched her execution this week. Pike was given two lethal doses of pentobarbital and survived.

She was taken from the execution chamber to a hospital, reportedly in critical condition.

The irony is hard to miss. The state is now trying to keep alive a woman it tried to kill — so that it can try again.

Capital punishment is on the back burner in the Philippines, so one could argue this has little to do with Filipinos. Maybe so.

Likewise, nobody is claiming that a failed execution proves Pike is innocent or erases her crime. The question is whether it entitles the state to a second attempt.

A death sentence should not be a license to keep trying until the prisoner dies. That would be cruel. It is a sentence to be carried out once, according to law and procedure. Tennessee says it followed its procedure.

The team administered the drugs. The prisoner lived. What do you call that? A failed execution? A sentence partly carried out? Or a government error to be fixed by repeating the act?

The last framing has an unsettling logic. When the state gets a prison term wrong, courts correct it. When it levies the wrong fine, it refunds the money. When it jails the wrong man, it releases him.

But a botched execution leaves the condemned with no ordinary remedy, and if the state itself caused the failure, it is odd that its remedy should be another attempt.

America the Great has spent decades trying to make executions predictable. A lethal injection was supposed to be cleaner than the electric chair. Some states have experimented with nitrogen gas, and South Carolina has brought back the firing squad.

Yet, executions still go wrong, and Pike’s case is only the latest reminder that no killing is ever fully controlled. Filipinos should remember this whenever the death penalty returns to the political agenda.

The debate here usually starts at the other end: Which crimes should carry death? Should murderers die? Drug traffickers? The especially heinous? Congress would have to answer those questions if capital punishment were restored.

What happens when the execution fails? Does the prisoner go free? Is there an argument for double jeopardy, applied in an unconventional way? Can the state try again, and how many times? At what point does the government’s failure become a reason to commute the sentence to life imprisonment?

Those may be more useful questions than yet another argument over whether some horrible criminal deserves to die.

A country that gives the state the power to execute should also decide what happens when the state cannot. The obvious answer, try again, deserves the most scrutiny.

After all, the prisoner has already been punished. The government has already tried to impose the ultimate penalty. It just didn’t work.