By Nco Dube | 01 October 2026

There is something unsettling about the story of Christa Gail Pike. Not because she is an obviously sympathetic figure. She is not. Pike was convicted of the horrific 1995 torture and murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in Tennessee. She was 18 when she committed the crime, and Slemmer’s family has lived with that brutality for more than three decades. Nothing in the argument against the death penalty requires us to feel sorry for murderers, excuse their crimes or extend to them some sentimental grace they have not earned. Victims cannot become footnotes in our concern about how the state punishes offenders.

But what happened in Tennessee this week forces a different question: what happens when we give the state the power to deliberately kill a human being? Pike was scheduled to die by lethal injection on Wednesday, 30 September. Less than two hours before the execution, a divided federal appeals court stayed it. Tennessee approached the US Supreme Court, which later vacated the stay. In a single day, Pike went from preparing to die, to being told she would live, and then that she would die after all.

Then the machinery of death resumed. Tennessee administered two doses of pentobarbital. Pike did not die. Witnesses reported that she remained alive and was snoring after the drugs had been administered. She was taken to hospital. Whatever one thinks she deserved, there is something grotesque about the state trying to kill someone, failing, and then handing her to doctors to preserve the life it had just attempted to extinguish.

Consider the psychological violence of those hours. You wake expecting to die. A court stops your execution. Another reverses that reprieve. You are taken back towards the execution chamber. Drugs intended to end your life are pumped into your body. They fail. Pointing out the cruelty of that process is not an invitation to forget the cruelty of the crime that put Pike there. It is simply to insist that the brutality of a criminal cannot become the moral standard by which the state conducts itself.

That distinction is essential in South Africa, where calls for the death penalty grow louder whenever violent crime overwhelms communities. The country faces horrifying levels of murder, femicide and mass killings. South Africans are angry, and that anger is understandable. There are crimes so depraved that ordinary language struggles to contain them. The instinct to say that certain offenders do not deserve to live is comprehensible, and I have no difficulty understanding why victims and their families might feel exactly that.

But believing that somebody may have morally forfeited our sympathy is not the same as believing the state should have the legal power to kill them. The death penalty debate is therefore not about whether murderers deserve kindness. Some do not deserve our sympathy at all. Some crimes are monstrous, and those who commit them should face the severest lawful punishment available. The argument against execution begins somewhere else entirely: with what powers a constitutional state should possess, particularly when those powers are irreversible.

South Africa does not approach this question without history. The gallows at Pretoria Central Prison are part of our national memory. Thousands of people were executed in South Africa during the twentieth century, and under apartheid capital punishment also formed part of the machinery of an authoritarian state operating within a profoundly unequal and racially oppressive system. State power never operates in a vacuum. It operates through institutions, human beings, prejudices, inequalities and political conditions.

That is why S v Makwanyane was such a foundational judgment. When the newly established Constitutional Court heard the case in February 1995, it was the first matter argued before the Court. On 6 June that year, the Court unanimously declared the death penalty unconstitutional. This was not softness towards murderers. It was not the Court declaring that murderers deserved grace. It grappled directly with retribution, deterrence, dignity, the right to life, arbitrariness and, critically, the possibility of error.

The Court recognised something that should haunt every execution debate: criminal justice systems make mistakes. Judges get things wrong. Police investigate badly. Witnesses lie. Confessions can be coerced. Forensic evidence can be mishandled. Poor defendants can receive inferior representation. A prison sentence can sometimes be corrected. An execution cannot be undone.

That is where the South African debate becomes especially uncomfortable. We complain daily about dysfunctional policing, poorly investigated cases, lost dockets, corruption, forensic delays, prosecutorial failures and cases that collapse after years. None of this means South African courts routinely convict innocent people. It means something simpler: the system is fallible.

Introduce an irreversible punishment into a fallible system and eventually the system will make an irreversible mistake. The question is whether any justice system can guarantee that it never will. In our context, where wealth influences the quality of legal representation and institutional capacity differs sharply from place to place, the poor and marginalised would inevitably carry a disproportionate share of that risk. 

Opposition to the death penalty therefore does not require believing that every condemned prisoner is innocent. It requires accepting that some will be, and that the state will discover some of its mistakes only after it is too late.

Then there is deterrence, perhaps the most common practical argument for the death penalty. The logic sounds intuitive: if murderers know they may be executed, they will think twice. The problem is that decades of research have not provided a reliable scientific basis for claiming that capital punishment deters homicide more effectively than long-term imprisonment. One cannot honestly say science has proved executions never deter anyone. But neither can governments responsibly present the death penalty as a proven crime-control instrument.

What we know about deterrence is less dramatic. The likelihood of being caught matters. The likelihood of being successfully prosecuted matters. The speed and certainty of justice matter. A murderer who believes nobody will investigate him properly is unlikely to spend much time calculating whether the maximum sentence is life imprisonment or death.

That is the harder conversation South Africa needs to have. We often reach for harsher sentences because they create the appearance of action while avoiding the difficult work of repairing institutions. It is easier to promise a gallows than to fix detective work, forensic capacity, prosecution services, court delays and corruption. Yet a justice system that catches murderers is a greater deterrent than a gallows waiting for murderers the state cannot find or successfully prosecute.

None of this invalidates the emotions of victims and their families. If someone murdered my child, I cannot confidently tell you what I would want done to that person. I may want vengeance. I may feel that the person has forfeited any claim on my mercy. That would be human. But criminal justice cannot simply become an institutional extension of our rage.

Justice must punish offenders severely and protect society from dangerous people, even if that means an offender spends the remainder of his or her natural life behind bars. Rejecting execution does not mean demanding leniency. It does not require forgiveness. It does not require rehabilitation in every case. There are people who may never safely return to society. The question is whether punishment must include deliberate killing in order to be serious, just or effective.

Revenge asks what would satisfy our anger. Constitutional justice asks what powers a democratic society should permit the state to exercise even when our anger is entirely justified. Those questions may sometimes produce different answers, and that difference is the point of having law rather than simply giving official expression to vengeance.

The Pike case strips away the euphemisms surrounding capital punishment. Officials prepare a chamber. Witnesses are seated. Drugs are measured. A human being is restrained. Poison is administered. A time of death is recorded. We bureaucratise killing so thoroughly that the paperwork can make it appear almost ordinary. Yet law does not make violence less violent. It gives that violence legal authority and official permission.

You do not have to like Christa Pike to find that disturbing. You do not have to forgive her. You do not have to minimise what she did, rehabilitate her reputation or diminish Colleen Slemmer’s suffering by a single degree. The argument against the death penalty is not an argument that murderers deserve our grace. It is an argument that even when confronted by the worst among us, the state should not be permitted to become an executioner.

South Africa answered that question constitutionally in *Makwanyane* three decades ago. Our violent-crime crisis understandably brings it back into public conversation. People are entitled to demand safety, punishment and a justice system that protects them. Dangerous offenders should be caught, convicted and, where necessary, removed from society permanently.

But before asking whether South Africa needs the power to execute criminals, we should ask why we so often fail to arrest them, investigate them properly, prosecute them competently and convict them on reliable evidence. Giving a struggling criminal justice system a more extreme punishment does not repair the system.

It merely raises the cost of its next mistake from injustice to something that can never be undone.