Originally published at The Crux
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As stories of executions hit the news in recent weeks, I thought of St. Thomas More, who went to the scaffold more joyfully than most and even kissed his executioner.
“I forgive you right readily,” Robert Bolt’s More tells the executioner in the film version of Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, handing the axeman a coin. “Be not afraid of your office; you send me to God.”
The coin was tradition in that era – executioners asked for forgiveness, and those executed gave the executioner a coin to ensure the act was swift.
Christa Pike’s execution on Sep. 30 wasn’t swift, or even effective. She survived a botched lethal injection at a Nashville prison. As of this writing, her lawyer says she is awake and walking.
(This even makes a person look nervously at More’s actual quotes recorded at his execution: “Strike not awry.”)
It’s not that there’s not much comparison of More and Pike.
Now 50, Pike was 18 when she and her boyfriend tortured and killed a classmate, Colleen Slemmer, in 1995.
That doesn’t mean the U.S. state of Tennessee did anything close to right by her.
While Pike was in hospital and her lawyers were
