Andrew T. Walker, who teaches Christian ethics, has published in National Review an essay titled What the Modern State Gets Wrong About Execution. His argument deserves a plain restatement, because it is true. The state does not hold a syringe; it bears the sword. Romans 13:4 names the governing authority “the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.” Genesis 9:6 fixes the accounting: “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.” The Western legal tradition — Blackstone, the common law, the natural law beneath both — has always understood that the community may take the life of the one who forfeited his life by taking another’s. The measure is the dignity of the murdered: because a human being is made in God’s image, the wanton destruction of one demands the life of the destroyer, and the family of the slain receives what imperfect justice can return to it. Capital punishment is not a relic in a Christian commonwealth. It is the retributive nerve of the civil order.
Walker’s precise charge is the medicalization of execution. The gurney, the IV line, the white coats, the physician’s certificate of death — all of it is cowardice dressed as compassion. It lets the citizenry believe it is watching anesthesia when it is watching justice. It conceals the moral fact that a human being is being put to death because the community’s law requires his blood. The courts have allowed the disguise; Baze and Glossip tolerated the infusion protocol, but no constitutional text requires it. The Eighth Amendment presupposes that the state will punish; it does not prescribe the instrument. At the founding, the gallows was the ordinary instrument of the common law, and the Republic did not suppose it was thereby corrupted. The Constitution forbids the arbitrary and the vicious, not the honest and the public. Walker is right to call the legislatures back to the old methods.
While Professor Walker filed his brief for the gallows, the body he writes about lay in a Nashville hospital. Tennessee’s execution team had pressed one dose of pentobarbital into Christa Pike’s arm and watched it not finish the work, then pressed a second dose and watched again. Her chest rose. Her heart kept its rhythm. The monitors continued to report a living woman where the state had ordered a dead one. This was the second time in five months that Tennessee’s instruments had failed to complete the work. The team unstrapped her, loaded her onto the gurney, and delivered her, still breathing, to the hospital, where physicians whose vocation is to preserve life took custody of the body the state had not yet ended. Governor Bill Lee has paused further executions through 2026 while a third party reviews the procedures. The sentence was not withdrawn. The judgment was not recalled. The state’s case was not reopened. Only the vehicle failed; the account remains open, and the state will return to it.
When the state returns, the review will not be asked whether the method should be gentler. It will be asked whether the method works. The methods the professor commends have a precise anatomy, and the state, having learned its lesson, will administer them exactly.
The gallows is a matter of calculation. The state weighs the body, measures the drop, and adjusts the rope so that the fall fractures the second cervical vertebra and severs the spinal cord at the instant the body stops. When the calculation is correct, unconsciousness is immediate, and the heart continues for a time on its own, pumping blood through a body whose brain is already disconnected — a body not suffocated, because the neck was broken, but undeniably beyond recovery. When the drop is short, the rope does not break the neck. It closes on the carotid vessels and the trachea, and the body strangles against its own weight. The face darkens and swells. The tongue protrudes. The limbs convulse for minutes. The bladder and the bowel empty. The heart beats on. When the drop is long, the rope takes the head from the shoulders. These outcomes are known. This is why the state calculates.
The firing squad has a simpler geometry. The state straps the body to the chair, hoods the head, and pins a white disc over the heart. The state loads five rifles: four with ball, one with a blank, so that no officer can swear he fired the fatal round. At the warden’s signal, the volley tears through the chest. The bullets transect the great vessels. Blood fills the thoracic cavity. The heart, still beating, continues to pump into a space never made for it. If the heart is destroyed, unconsciousness follows in seconds as the pressure collapses. If the heart survives its wound, the body bleeds until it cannot, and the convulsions are what they are. When the heart persists, the officer steps forward and finishes the work with a pistol round behind the ear. The sand absorbs what the trunk has poured out. These are not speculations. They are the reasons the state selected these instruments: they are honest. They do not pretend that a man strapped to a chair with five rifles aimed at his chest is undergoing a procedure.
And the state will not confine itself to the one woman whose sentence it has not yet completed. Walker invites the legislatures to make the penalty eligible for more crimes — the whole sweep of offenses against children — and the order he commends will not decline the invitation. Each such body will be weighed, measured, strapped, dropped, or expended. The accounts are many, and the ledger has room.
The doctrine that settles these bodies is not a criminal statute. It is the covenant. When Colleen Slemmer’s blood was shed in 1995, it entered a particular account — the account of a human being made in the image of God, protected by the civil order as a member of the household. The one who shed it set herself outside that household. Genesis 9:6 does not ask the state whether the murderer finds the method to her taste. It declares what the shedding requires: the forfeiture of the shedder’s own blood. Christa Pike is not a patient the state failed to heal. She is a debtor the state has not yet finished collecting. Every lungful she draws in that Nashville bed is drawn on borrowed time — time the community has already counted against her, time the gallows will settle when the state resumes its office.
The failure in Tennessee was not the state’s purpose, which was just. The failure was the state’s costume — the syringe, the white coats, the clinical chatter — as though the covenant could be satisfied by an anesthetic. The hospital may keep the body breathing; it cannot change what the body is for. The body is for the sentence. When the state hangs the next culprit, or the one after, or the one who took a child, the state will not merely be punishing. It will be reading the verdict aloud in the flesh: this one belonged outside. This one forfeited the blessing. This one’s blood is required by the order he broke. The suffering is not a side effect of the account. The suffering is the account, rendered visibly, in the square that let the deed be done.
The gallows does not conceal what it is. That is its virtue. The firing squad does not disguise its work. That is its service. The order stands as it has always stood: the sword drawn by God’s servant, the account paid in the coin the covenant specifies, the bodies of the reprobate returned to the ground from which the household of the living was separated. The ledger is closed in the old way. The state that tells the truth about its sword is the state that honors the God who granted it.