Making death a public spectacle is part of the United States’ history of enforcing white racial power. The proposed livestream of an execution brings that history into the present, while Tennessee’s failed execution exposes the violence beneath the language of lawful punishment. Lynching and judicial executions sustained racial inequality, and constitutional law has failed to eliminate racism from capital punishment. Racial justice requires confronting that history, rejecting the spectacle, and ending the government’s power to kill.
On September 30, 2026, Tennessee tried to kill Christa Pike. She survived two doses of pentobarbital, the drug intended to end her life. She was hospitalized unconscious and placed on a ventilator. By October 10, her attorneys reported that she had been discharged and returned to prison, where she continued to receive medical care. The state tried to kill her. Medical workers then had to save her life. That sequence exposes the violence concealed by the language of lawful execution.
Days later, the Pentagon announced plans to livestream the firing squad execution of Nidal Malik Hasan, convicted of killing 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009. His execution was scheduled for December 3. As of October 10, the broadcast remained uncertain: President Donald Trump said he had not decided whether to allow it.
These events raise different questions about the same power. Pike’s failed execution exposes the physical reality beneath the language of lawful punishment. The proposed livestream asks the public to watch the government deliberately end a human life.
In the United States, public killing has a racial history. Any government that proposes to broadcast an execution must answer for what it is reviving.
The Government’s Power Has Limits
The murders for which Pike and Hasan were convicted caused devastating harm. Their victims deserve recognition, and their families deserve sustained support. Government remains responsible for respecting constitutional limits, even when responding to devastating crimes.
The question is what government may do in response. A conviction establishes criminal responsibility. It does not give government unlimited authority over a person’s body or erase the Constitution’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.
Pike’s survival should force scrutiny of the execution process, including what officials knew, what they did, and whether constitutional protections were violated. Her survival alone does not settle those legal questions. But it makes the consequences of exercising the power to kill impossible to dismiss as a technical matter.
The proposed broadcast presents an additional question: why should government turn the killing into a public event?
Independent reporting can expose government abuse. Public accountability requires access to evidence, records, and meaningful investigation. A government-produced broadcast can serve a different purpose: presenting death as a demonstration of authority. The public must ask whose interests that presentation serves and what conduct it encourages us to accept.
Public Killing and White Racial Power
During Jim Crow, public killing helped enforce white supremacy. Black people were lynched to punish alleged offenses, suppress demands for equality, and warn entire communities against challenging white racial power.
The Equal Justice Initiative documents lynchings attended by crowds that included prominent citizens and elected officials. Some victims had never been accused of a crime. The killings were widely tolerated by officials, and participants frequently escaped punishment.
These were generally unlawful murders. White officials helped sustain racial terror when they failed to protect Black people, tolerated mob violence, or allowed killers to escape punishment. The law’s promise of protection meant little when those responsible for enforcing it refused to protect Black lives.
The Ku Klux Klan was part of this racial terror. But concentrating responsibility on the Klan alone allows the wider white community and public institutions to disappear from the account. Racial terror flourished when people committed violence, others celebrated it, and officials failed to protect Black lives or punish the killers.
The person murdered was the immediate victim. The audience for the threat was much larger. Public suffering communicated that Black freedom, dignity, and security remained subject to white control.
That is why the spectacle matters. The crowd helped give the killing its political meaning.
Racial Terror Also Operated Through Courts
The history of racial killing cannot be divided neatly into unlawful mobs and impartial courts. The death penalty itself carried racial distinctions.
The Death Penalty Information Center reports that, between 1930 and 1972, 455 people were executed for rape in the United States. Of those, 405—approximately 89 percent—were Black. Nearly all of these executions occurred in former Confederate states.
Those figures describe executions for rape, not all executions. These executions reveal how the legal system used the power to kill overwhelmingly against Black people convicted of rape. The racial hierarchy extended into the courthouse, where punishment carried the authority of the state.
EJI’s historical research also connects the decline of lynching with increased reliance on court-ordered executions following proceedings that were sometimes accelerated to satisfy demands for punishment.
Moving a killing into a courtroom changed its legal form without resolving the racial power surrounding it. Judicial proceedings carried the authority of law while operating within a society that denied Black people equal protection.
This history requires us to examine both who receives a death sentence and whose victimization generates the strongest demand for death.
Constitutional Reform and Its Limits
In Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972), the Supreme Court invalidated the death sentences before it under the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. The Justices issued separate opinions, with concerns including arbitrary punishment and racial discrimination. The decision disrupted existing death penalty systems; it did not produce a majority holding that every death sentence was unconstitutional.
Four years later, in Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U.S. 153 (1976), the Court upheld Georgia’s revised capital sentencing system. The decision accepted procedural safeguards intended to guide sentencing and reduce arbitrary decisions.
Under Supreme Court precedent, capital punishment is not categorically unconstitutional. The argument for abolition therefore challenges both the practice and the legal framework that permits it.
The central problem remained: could those procedures overcome racial inequality?
In McCleskey v. Kemp, 481 U.S. 279 (1987), a Black defendant sentenced to death for killing a white police officer presented a statistical study of Georgia capital cases. The study identified substantial racial disparities, particularly associated with the victim’s race. The Court assumed the study’s validity for purposes of its analysis but rejected his constitutional claims. For equal protection, it required proof of discriminatory purpose in his own case; it also rejected his Eighth Amendment challenge.
The Court left McCleskey’s death sentence in place despite evidence of racial inequality in Georgia’s capital sentencing system. Its demand for proof of discriminatory purpose in his individual case created a barrier to challenging racism operating across the system.
A system can produce racial disparities across many decisions without giving each defendant the evidence needed to prove discriminatory purpose in an individual case. By rejecting the statistical evidence as sufficient, the Court left systemic racial inequality without a constitutional remedy in McCleskey’s case.
Procedural reform deserves scrutiny by its results. The existence of a trial, an appeal, and a written judgment does not establish that racial injustice has been removed.
What a Livestream Would Ask Us to Accept
A judicial execution and a lynching have different legal foundations. The historical connection lies in the use of public death to display power, define an enemy, and enlist an audience.
Hasan’s Muslim identity adds another question of racial justice: whether the government’s presentation of his execution will encourage hostility toward Muslims as a group. Turning Hasan’s execution into a public spectacle creates a danger that viewers will treat his death as a victory over Muslims. His criminal responsibility is individual. Muslims bear no collective responsibility for his crimes.
Pike’s case exposes the violence of execution. The racial history of capital punishment remains relevant even when a particular case does not establish racial discrimination.
A livestream expands the audience far beyond an execution chamber. Viewers could replay, circulate, celebrate, or weaponize the images. Government would be responsible for creating that public spectacle, even if it could not control every subsequent use.
We should reject the idea that the public needs to watch a person die to understand the seriousness of murder.
Refusing the Spectacle
We should oppose the proposed broadcast, demand a full and independent investigation of Pike’s failed execution, and press for an end to capital punishment. Accountability also requires investment in victims’ families and violence prevention.
The racial justice question reaches beyond whether one execution follows an approved procedure. It asks whether we will continue to authorize an institution with a documented history of racially unequal punishment—and whether we will allow government to make its violence an event for public consumption.
The United States has a documented history of making public killing an instrument of white racial power. Broadcasting an execution would place government behind another spectacle of human death. We should confront what that spectacle teaches the public about power, punishment, and whose humanity can be discarded.
We should oppose the broadcast and the death penalty itself. Racial justice requires confronting unequal punishment, supporting people harmed by violence, and limiting the government’s power to kill.
Cases
Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972). Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/408/238. Last visited October 11, 2026.
Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U.S. 153 (1976). Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/428/153/. Last visited October 11, 2026.
McCleskey v. Kemp, 481 U.S. 279 (1987). Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/481/279. Last visited October 11, 2026.
Secondary Sources
Associated Press, “Christa Pike is discharged from a hospital after surviving execution attempt, her attorneys say” (October 10, 2026). AP News. https://apnews.com/article/5949ace6ed0e81d923348d10ed03e040. Last checked October 11, 2026.
Death Penalty Information Center, “Race, Rape, and the Death Penalty.” Death Penalty Information Center. https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/policy-issues/biases-and-vulnerabilities/race/race-rape-and-the-death-penalty. Last visited October 11, 2026.
Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror (3d ed. 2017). Equal Justice Initiative. https://lynchinginamerica.eji.org/report/. Last visited October 11, 2026.
Reuters, “Republican opposition widens to livestreamed execution; Trump still weighing it” (October 9, 2026). Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/vance-says-he-does-not-know-if-pentagon-will-proceed-with-livestream-fort-hood-2026-10-09/. Last visited October 11, 2026.
Reuters, “Tennessee execution survivor Christa Pike is conscious and speaking, lawyers say” (October 6, 2026). Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/tennessee-execution-survivor-christa-pike-is-conscious-speaking-media-reports-2026-10-06/. Last visited October 11, 2026.
Reuters, “Trump orders firing squad for gunman who killed 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas” (October 6, 2026). Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-orders-firing-squad-gunman-who-killed-13-people-fort-hood-texas-2026-10-06/. Last visited October 11, 2026.
Vernellia R. Randall, Professor Emerita of Law, University of Dayton School of Law. This article is the sole intellectual and scholarly work of Vernellia Randall. ChatGPT was used only as a drafting aid comparable to a research or editing assistant. All concepts, analysis, legal reasoning, interpretations, and conclusions are entirely the author’s own, and the author assumes full responsibility for the content.
