Can the State Be Trusted With the Death Penalty?
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Steve Hayes is CEO and editor of The Dispatch, based in Annapolis, Maryland. Prior to co-founding the company in 2019, he worked at The Weekly Standard for 18 years, covering Washington, politics, and national security. Steve is the author of two New York Times bestsellers. He also worked as a contributor at CNN and Fox News, and currently serves as a political analyst at NBC News. When Steve is not focused on The Dispatch, he’s probably traveling with his family, grilling, or riding his mountain bike.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief and co-founder of The Dispatch, based in Washington, D.C. Prior to that, enormous lizards roamed the Earth. More immediately prior to that, Jonah spent two decades at National Review, where he was a senior editor, among other things. He is also a bestselling author, longtime columnist for the Los Angeles Times, commentator for CNN, and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. When he is not writing the G-File or hosting The Remnant podcast, he finds real joy in family time, attending to his dogs and cat, and blaming Steve Hayes for various things.
Michael Warren is politics editor at The Dispatch and is based in Washington, D.C. A former on-air reporter at CNN and a senior writer at The Weekly Standard , he has spent more than 15 years covering lawmakers on Capitol Hill, the White House and the executive branch, the conservative movement, and political campaigns. When Mike is not reporting, writing, editing, and podcasting, he is probably spending time with his wife and three sons.
John McCormack is a senior editor at The Dispatch and is based in Washington, D.C. Prior to joining the company in 2023, he was Washington correspondent at National Review and a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. When John is not reporting on politics and policy, he is probably enjoying life with his wife and daughters in northern Virginia or having fun visiting family in Wisconsin.
The podcast transcription below was generated using artificial intelligence and may include occasional errors or misspellings.
[intro music playing] Welcome to the Dispatch Podcast. I'm your host, Steve Hayes. On today's roundtable, we'll look at the case of Krista Pike, a Tennessee woman convicted of murder in 1995, and her botched execution by the state last week. Can the state be trusted with the death penalty? Does this case prove the anti-death penalty crowd has been making the right argument all along? Then a New York Times/Siena poll shows that Republicans continue to fall behind Democrats. We'll talk about the competitive Senate race in Iowa with two Dispatch reporters who have spent time on the ground reporting from there, and we'll look at some telling developments in the Texas Senate race, including perhaps the most illustrative example of partisan brain rot we've seen this cycle. And then, not worth your time, bowling? I'm joined today by Dispatch Editor-in-Chief Jonah Goldberg, Politics Editor Mike Warren, and Senior Editor John McCormick. Let's dive right in. [instrumental music playing] Hello, gentlemen. Thank you for joining me. I wanna start today with a story that's been in the news over the past week, and it involves this botched execution in Tennessee, execution of a fifty-year-old woman named Krista Pike, who'd been convicted of a really gruesome murder of an acquaintance of hers from college, as I understand it. There was some kind of a love triangle. The details of the crime we will skip over, but it was a very gruesome murder. Fast-forward to this past year, Krista Pike was scheduled to be put to death. She exhausted her appeals, and the State of Tennessee attempted to execute her last week. It did not work. It did not take. And this has, I think, triggered a, a big debate nationally about the death penalty, about how to execute people if we agree that the state is going to execute them. So I wanna spend a few minutes talking about this story. And Mike, let me start with you.
I think the first question, certainly the first question that I had and the first question that people have had when I've talked to them about this over the past several days is, how is it possible to botch an execution?
I think a good question. It's the first question to ask. This is a s- a responsibility that the State of Tennessee has taken on itself, and it's screwed it up royally. There's a lot to be said for the sort of bush league approach that these executions have taken now with lethal injections, where you're, you're really not getting the highest quality of pharmacists and folks who put these drugs together. And so there's a lot of guessing that goes along with it. Pieces of the sort of the cocktail, the drug cocktail that the executioners put together coming from different pharmacies. And it's ultimately, I think, just kind of shoddy work all around. And look, I say this as somebody who used to be pro-death penalty. My views on this have changed. I'm, I'm against it now. But I do believe that if a state is going to adopt the death penalty as a punishment, as the final punishment for the most heinous of crimes, they should do it right. And the fact that Tennessee was unable to do it, I think is sort of an institutional failure. And perhaps it raises some good…
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