Lauren Frances's new video has a title that does the argument for her: liberals are defending Christa Pike after a failed execution, because of course they are. The question underneath it is whether anything is still too far. The honest answer is that almost nobody is defending what Pike did. They are defending a rule about what the state may do back. Those are not the same claim, and mixing them up is how a thirty-year-old murder case gets recast as proof that one political tribe has lost the plot.
Pike was eighteen in 1995 when she took part in the killing of Colleen Slemmer, a nineteen-year-old classmate in Knoxville. She did not deny the killing. A jury convicted her of first-degree murder. She has been the only woman on Tennessee's death row, and last week she was due to become the first woman the state had executed in more than two centuries. Governor Bill Lee denied clemency. On 30 September the execution went ahead after the Supreme Court lifted a last-minute stay. Two doses of pentobarbital were given. She was still alive, audibly snoring, and was taken to a Nashville hospital unconscious and on a ventilator. Her lawyers say the IV team struggled for about an hour, that at least seven needles went into one arm, and that they had warned the state about small veins and a blood disorder. Lee halted the remaining executions for the year and ordered a review. The prisons chief has since resigned.
That is the fact pattern Frances is reacting to. The liberal response, such as it is, has not been "Pike was right." It has been the death-penalty argument the American Left has made for decades, plus the mitigation brief her lawyers have made for years: she was barely an adult, she has a history of childhood sexual abuse and mental illness, and a lethal injection that fails and leaves the prisoner in critical care is no longer a clean legal sanction. Some Tennessee Democrats said the failure is a reason to abolish the penalty. The three liberal justices had already wanted the court to look harder before the attempt. Human-rights groups and abolitionist demonstrators were outside the prison before anything went wrong. None of that started on Wednesday night.
So the "because of course they are" lands only if you treat opposition to an execution as support for the person being executed. A lot of people do treat it that way, and the emotional case is not stupid. Murder victim Slemmer is the one who does not get a ventilator, a review, or a second chance at a sentence. Thirty years of appeals can look like a system that has forgotten the victim and become fascinated by the perpetrator. If your moral centre is retribution for a torture killing, then age, abuse, and a botched IV are details, not defeats. Frances is speaking to that instinct, and it is widely shared outside her audience.
It is still a bad description of the other side. Principled opposition to the death penalty does not scale with the horror of the crime. It gets louder as the crime gets worse, because that is when the state is most tempted to kill. The same people who oppose executing Pike opposed executing men whose crimes were as bad or worse. You can call that a mistake. You cannot call it a new madness that appeared when the prisoner was a woman who survived the needle. The botched procedure added a separate claim, and a narrower one: once the state has already put her through an hour of failed lines and two doses that did not kill her, doing it again is a different constitutional problem from the original sentence. Even people who want her dead can think the state just proved it cannot currently do this competently. Lee, a Republican, effectively conceded that by stopping the calendar.
Are there limits? Yes, and they are structural rather than sentimental. The abolitionist position is a claim about what the state may do, not about who deserves sympathy, and that is precisely why it cannot escalate past the crime. It does not get stronger as the victim gets more blameless or the killer more monstrous, because it was never calibrated to either. It is calibrated to the state. That is also why the appearance of no-limit is misleading: the thing that makes the position look formless, that it keeps objecting no matter how bad the crime, is the same thing that proves it is bounded. A position that scales with horror would eventually run out of horror to scale with. A position anchored to state power has nothing to run out of, and so it looks infinite to anyone measuring it on the wrong axis. Look at what almost no liberal figure is actually saying. Nobody serious is arguing the killing of Colleen Slemmer was justified, that Pike should walk free in Knoxville, or that the jury got the facts wrong. The fight is life without parole versus death, and whether a failed execution may be repeated. That is a real disagreement about state power. It is not a fandom, and it is not madness. It is a fixed position that looks unbounded only when you insist on reading it as something it never claimed to be.
The limit that does fail, often, is proportion in the telling. Mitigation language can slide into a portrait of Pike as mainly a patient and a victim, with Slemmer reduced to the occasion for a policy argument. Celebrity abolitionism does this constantly. It is grotesque, and it hands Frances the clip she wants. It is not the same as the legal position. A politics that cannot say "this woman tortured a classmate to death, and the state still should not kill her" has earned the mockery. A politics that can say that is not mad. It is just unpopular, and on this crime it should be.
If one supports the death penalty choose reliable execution methods, or not at all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gSo5FM4ZVc