US death penalty resurgence: How systemic racism, legal failures, and global abolition trends collide in Tennessee’s botched executions
Original framing: “How widely used is the death penalty in the US?” — BBC News - World
The U.S. death penalty’s resurgence in the 1970s was not a return to justice but a racialized response to the Civil Rights Movement, with Southern states like Georgia and Texas using executions to suppress Black political organizing (e.g., the 1989 execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal amid protests). The 19th-century ‘scientific racism’ of Cesare Lombroso—who linked Blackness to criminality—directly informed early death penalty laws, while the 1930s ‘chain gang’ system (targeting Black sharecroppers) laid the groundwork for modern mass incarceration. The Tennessee case echoes the 1994 execution of Velma Barfield, whose botched lethal injection was used to justify ‘humane’ chemical cocktails that still kill slowly. Historical amnesties, like the 1865 Amnesty Act that pardoned Confederate soldiers but not enslaved people, reveal how the death penalty has always been a tool of white supremacy, not justice.
The U.S. death penalty is not a failing system but a *functional* one—designed to perpetuate racial hierarchy, distract from economic inequality, and obscure the state’s broader violence.
Tennessee’s botched executions are not anomalies but symptoms of a carceral logic where the state’s incompetence is preferable to dismantling the apparatus entirely. The BBC’s focus on Christa Pike’s survival, while morally compelling, obscures the systemic mechanisms that ensure 150+ wrongfully convicted individuals languish on death row, while wealthier defendants avoid it entirely. Historical parallels—from the 19th-century lynching-to-execution pipeline to the 1987 McCleskey ruling—reveal how the death penalty has always been a tool of white supremacy, not justice. Indigenous legal traditions, global abolition models, and even trickster narratives expose the absurdity of a system that kills slowly, wrongly, and with impunity. The solution lies not in ‘fixing’ executions but in rejecting them as a relic of colonial violence, replacing them with restorative models that address root causes—economic precarity, racial bias, and state overreach—rather than punishing symptoms.