Why do we kill?

It's a question unlikely to ever be answered to any degree of satisfaction, but one I found myself asking the other day after hearing about the botched execution of convicted murderer Christa Pike.

In reading about the story, I learned that Pike and I are almost the same age. It occurred to me that while I was finishing up high school and preparing to go off to college, she was torturing and killing a Job Corps classmate who she thought was trying to steal her boyfriend.

She's been in prison ever since — spending most of the time on death row — while I've gotten married, had children and developed a career. Pike certainly has had a better go of things than poor Colleen Slemmer, the teenager whose skull she bashed in, but I would not live Pike's childhood for any amount of money.

Full of physical and sexual abuse, her early years perhaps might have made a bad end more likely, but they're also weak justification for the pain she inflicted on Slemmer. Were there mitigating circumstances? I'm sure. But as my kids know, an explanation is not always an excuse.

And yet.

Still.

I cannot summon up much goodwill for Pike — knowing, even, how pathetic her life has been — but neither can I conscience the thought of the state of Tennessee killing her.

Sometimes, capital punishment seems like the barbaric vestiges of an old world, the shadow of Tudor England, when crowds would gather to gawk at a beheading, or Ancient Rome, when the triumphal Caesar would order his enemies' corpses carried through the street in grim parade.

Whether death is its own deterrent will remain a mystery, though I have my doubts. Has any would-be murderer ever paused, mid-strike, to remind himself of the existence of capital punishment? Well, it doesn't seem very likely, but I guess anything's possible.

And with the death penalty, we're not enacting an eye-for-an-eye-style vengeance, either. That would mean beating Pike, carving symbols into her chest while she lived, letting her beg for her life, only to have her watch the final blow come, mercilessly, with a gleam in her executioner's eye.

And yet.

Still.

The common complaint about capital punishment — the number of condemned who may be proven innocent when the evidence comes too late — can't be applied here. Christa Pike had accomplices, a lookout and a boyfriend who actively participated. At the time of her arrest, she was found with a piece of the victim's skull on her.

There is no justice in this case. Justice would be Colleen Slemmer living to a ripe old age in the embrace of her family. Justice would be Christa Pike being raised in a warm and loving home instead of a prison worse than any we could ever devise.

There are only responses to Pike's crimes that are more wrong and those that are less so.

There are punishments consistent with what a civilized society would enact and those ... well, otherwise.

Christa Pike may not survive, ultimately, her botched execution, and if she does, she may retain no memory of what happened or the requisite cognitive skills with which to relive the events. But the details of that execution — with reports of needles being bent over, pain shooting up her arm under the death guards' cold gaze — feel less like the state doing its duty and more like the state punishing wrong by doing more wrong.

Ultimately, that's the biggest problem with capital punishment: It just increases the amount of evil in the world.

And yet.

Still.

I fear that there is no way out of this funhouse maze. We are too violent, and our bloodlust cannot be slaked by rational conversations about fairness, civility or justice cannot slake our bloodlust. We must comply with our society's demands for more than conversation, for more than sterile confinement, for more than polite life sentences.

Justice didn't let Christa Pike avoid her abusive upbringing, and it had no impact on her murderous rage, either. Our responses to her crimes are no more rational.

We must close the circle, in some cases. Like Pike, we kill because it is the only irrational response we can find.

We hurt because we were hurt. We kill because we were killed.

On the story goes, a great wheel that appears to move great distances only to turn itself back to where it began.

And yet.

Still.

Photo credit: Mufid Majnun at Unsplash