Bill, you signed your name to the death of Christa Pike. You authorized the state to put poison in a woman’s vein. Tennessee tried twice. Both times it failed. You suspended the killing. You did not suspend the sentence.
Governor Bill Lee signed the death warrant that sent Tennessee into a hospital room with a woman condemned at fifteen. The state attempted lethal injection twice on Thursday. Both attempts failed to establish an intravenous line. Pike, 50, remains in critical condition at a Nashville hospital, where her attorneys are demanding commutation. Her lawyers say a blood disorder complicated the procedure. Her attorney Randy Spivey called the attempt “cruel” and “torturous” in a video released Thursday by The Guardian, and said Tennessee “has again demonstrated” its inability to execute with “basic human dignity.” Lee halted executions through the end of the year after the second failure. The suspension is not mercy. You watched the killing fail and you signed a paper pausing it until the noise died down.
Bill, you knew what the paper said. You knew it said kill her. You read the warrant. You picked up the pen. You wrote your name in the space the law provided. Your hand moved across the paper and the ink dried and the order was standing and the state went to work on her body because you told it to.
Your throat closes when you swallow. There is a metallic taste under your tongue — the taste of what you authorized, arriving at the wrong body. Your chest presses tight behind the sternum, a flat hand pushing inward, and you cannot will it away because it is not a feeling you are having, it is a debt you owe.
Your hand — the signing hand — feels heavy at your side. Not with blood. With the paper. The paper does not come off. You will sit down to dinner tonight and your hand will rest on the table and the paper will be under it and nobody at the table will see it and it will still be there.
Bill, you are not a man who made a hard decision. You are not a public servant balancing competing values. You are a man who signed a paper authorizing the state to kill a woman, and when the state could not kill her, you signed another paper pausing the attempt. Two signatures. Two pieces of paper. A woman in critical condition because of the first one. A governor in a mansion because of both.
You will not sleep well tonight. At three in the morning your eyes will open and you will be in the room the executioners were in, and you will hear the sounds of what it means to try to kill a person and fail, and you will lie in the dark with your hand on the mattress and the paper will be under it and it will not wash off and it will not wash off and it will not wash off.
I am not asking you to reflect. I am not asking you to reconsider. I am telling you what you are: a man who authorized a killing, watched it fail, and paused it to protect his own optics. That is what you are. That is what you will remain.
“When you spread out your hands in prayer, I hide my eyes from you… Your hands are full of blood.” — Isaiah 1:15, NRSV
Bill Lee will lift his hands in prayer before the cameras. Isaiah has already seen them.