The Woman Who Chose Love on Death Row — Part 2
The Woman Who Chose Love on Death Row — Part 2
by James Porter
By the time you read this, you probably already know what happened to Christa Pike. She survived an execution attempt in which the state of Tennessee administered two doses of pentobarbital. What happened in that execution chamber was extraordinary, but for me the more important part of this story begins several weeks and months before Pike ever entered that room.
I should begin by saying where I stand on the death penalty. I don't believe in capital punishment, primarily because our justice system is run by human beings, and human beings make mistakes. Since 1989, at least 375 people in the United States have been exonerated through DNA evidence, including 21 people who had previously been sentenced to death. If we execute even one innocent person, there is no way to correct that mistake. For me, life imprisonment is the only punishment that leaves open the possibility of correcting a wrongful conviction. (Innocence Project)
There is another argument against capital punishment that many people don't know about: it costs more to execute someone than to keep them in prison for life. Capital cases require more extensive trials, appeals, specialized defense teams, security and other expenses, and studies consistently find that death-penalty cases cost substantially more than comparable cases resulting in life imprisonment. Estimates vary by state, but the Death Penalty Information Center reports that recent studies have generally found capital punishment to cost roughly 2.5 to 5 times as much as life imprisonment. (Death Penalty Information Center)
Christa Pike's case makes that almost impossible to ignore. She spent nearly 30 years on death row, during which time there were appeals, legal proceedings, stays of execution and, ultimately, an enormously complicated execution procedure that itself failed. Whatever your position on the morality of capital punishment, it is difficult to look at a system that can spend decades and millions of dollars attempting to accomplish something that could be accomplished by keeping the person imprisoned for life and not conclude that we ought to reconsider what we are doing.
But that's not really what I want to talk about.
What fascinates me about Christa Pike is what she chose to do with her mind while waiting to die. We touched on this in Part 1.
Her spiritual adviser, Buddhist teacher Rev. Mikey Noechel, introduced her to a form of meditation called loving-kindness meditation, or metta. It is a practice in which you silently repeat phrases wishing yourself well—May I be happy. May I be healthy. May I be free from suffering—and then gradually extend those same wishes to people you love, people you barely know, and eventually people with whom you have difficulty. In its more advanced forms, the practice deliberately includes people who have hurt you or whom you consider an enemy.
I first became particularly interested in this form of meditation when I read Altered Traits by Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson, two of the scientists who have done more than almost anyone to bring rigorous scientific investigation to meditation. They point out that loving-kindness, in one version or another, has become the most well-studied format of compassion meditation. Research has found measurable effects on positive emotion, compassion and prosocial behavior, although the science is still developing and the effects should not be exaggerated. (FlipHTML5)
What makes the practice especially interesting is the way it expands. You don't simply sit there thinking pleasant thoughts about yourself. You begin with yourself, move toward people you love, then neutral people, and eventually toward people you find difficult—even people who have harmed you. The point isn't to pretend that you like someone who has hurt you. It is to practice wishing that person freedom from suffering anyway.
Tibetan Buddhist monks have taken this kind of mental training to a level most of us can barely comprehend. Some of the neuroscientific studies described by Goleman and Davidson involved Tibetan monks and other highly experienced practitioners with tens of thousands of hours of meditation practice. In one remarkable line of research, experienced practitioners engaged in compassion meditation while researchers measured their brain activity and found striking differences from less experienced meditators. (FlipHTML5)
And then there are the famous experiments involving tummo, a different Tibetan meditation practice involving visualization and specialized breathing. Researchers studying expert practitioners found that they could substantially increase peripheral body temperature, reproducing in a laboratory something that had long been reported in Tibetan monasteries: monks sitting in very cold conditions with wet sheets wrapped around their bodies and generating enough heat to dry them. This isn't magic, and it isn't loving-kindness meditation; it is an extraordinary demonstration of how extensively trained mental practices can influence the body. (PubMed)
Which brings me back to Christa Pike.
She had committed a terrible crime as an 18-year-old. She spent the next three decades living with the consequences of that crime on death row. Whatever we believe about her punishment, she appears to have reached a point where she could acknowledge what she had done without wanting to spend the last moments of her life consumed by hatred toward the people who were there to execute her.
That is what I find so compelling about loving-kindness meditation. It doesn't require you to declare that everything is okay. It doesn't ask you to excuse someone who has harmed you. And it certainly doesn't require you to abandon accountability. It asks a much harder question: Can you acknowledge what happened without allowing hatred to determine who you become?
Christa Pike practiced that meditation as she approached her execution. Then, when she was strapped to the gurney and the execution began, she reportedly remained remarkably cooperative with the people trying to establish the IV, even telling them where her arm hurt and asking them to try a different location. We don't know exactly what was going through her mind at that moment, and I don't want to turn an extraordinary medical event into a spiritual miracle. But it is difficult not to think about the practice she had spent months preparing to use when she finally confronted the people she could most easily have regarded as her enemies.
Perhaps that is one of the most challenging things mindfulness can teach us.
We may not be able to control what other people do to us. But with enough practice, perhaps we can become a little more capable of choosing who we are going to be when it happens.
Erica Tuminski
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