How could it be? Many Europeans, especially of a liberal persuasion, never pass up an opportunity to criticise the USA. President Trump makes sure that they are never short of material. But this week, matters reached new heights - or depths - in Tennessee. The authorities tried to execute a woman who had been on death row for thirty years. They failed. How grotesque is that.
Everything was wrong. First, the lethal injection. As anyone who has been operated on under a general anaesthetic is aware, rendering a patient unconscious ought to be a straightforward procedure. There is a preliminary jab: a mere prick, less painful than stubbing one's toe on the bath. Then the anaesthetist can go to work. In those circumstances, there is a constraint. Above all, he has to ensure that the patient will wake up. But when there is no such need, it should surely be possible to extinguish life with a massive dosage.
The death-row botch in Tennessee would be laughable if it were not a matter of life and death. But there had already been another botch, incomprehensible to Europeans. Christa Pike has been on death row for thirty years. Again, grotesque is the only possible description. A criminal is entitled to due process. That is even more true in a capital case. Yet there ought to be limits. When we hanged murderers in the UK, there was a trial at first instance. A conviction would be followed by an appeal. If that was rejected, it would be up to the Home Secretary. Would he grant a reprieve, or would he let the law take its course? Few if any of them relished that dread aspect of their responsibilities. Somewhere in a Home Secretary's office, there was a fixture that looked like a billiard scorer, but which dramatised the decision-making process. It marked off the days remaining before the execution was due. If the sentence stood, the murderer would be dead in about six weeks.
Macabre times. In the UK, females were rarely executed. Early last century, when a murderess had been sentenced to death, Queen Alexandra would always write to the Home Secretary of the day and ask whether there were really no grounds for a reprieve. These were usually men of humane instincts, who sincerely disliked the thought of hanging women. The Queen's intervention added to their stress. They did not always feel able to accede to Her Majesty's wishes, and would then have to write the letter explaining why: not an enjoyable task.
A few decades later came the hanging of Ruth Ellis. To us, that seems incomprehensible. She had suffered a lot of maltreatment and there seem to have been plenty of grounds for a reprieve. Indeed, her death added support to the movement to abolish the death penalty.
Some years later, I met Ruth Ellis's daughter. She seemed to be a sad, sweet, gentle person - and she died young. Was there a psychosomatic element in such an early demise? She did seem bereft. When did she find out what had happened to her mother? Not a subject one cares to think about. Then again, not all women criminals deserve sympathy. If the death penalty had still been on the statute book when Myra Hindley was convicted, Frank Longford would no doubt have called for a reprieve. He would not have had much support. A woman who watches children being tortured to death has put herself beyond any chivalrous protection due to her sex. Hindley belonged with the hard-faced bestial Nazi bitches from Ravensbrück or Buchenwald: on the scaffold.
Returning to Tennessee, there could be two arguments in favour of the death penalty, retribution and deterrence. Both are vitiated by the equivalent of a life sentence on death row. No doubt some of Pike's victim's relatives would have wanted to see her put to death. They might have claimed that it would bring them closure. No doubt again, most of them really meant vengeance. Although it is debatable to what extent that should be humoured in the criminal code, an element of retribution is inescapable. But the thought of the murderess on death row, somewhere between life and death, with regular fresh hearings and lawyers' disputes, is hardly conducive to closure. As for deterrence, the delay destroys the force. It would be like punishing a dog next week for making a mess on the carpet today.
In 1901, the man who assassinated President McKinley died in the electric chair around two months later. The verdict, the sentence and the timing passed as a matter of course. At the time of writing, medics in Tennessee are fighting to keep Christa Pike alive, shortly after some of their colleagues failed to kill her. Talk about black comedy. The whole affair is not a reason for abolishing the death penalty, though abolitionists will no doubt exploit it. But assuming that there will still be death sentences, there must be a better way of dealing with them than franchising the matter to the theatre of the absurd.