State legislators and the courts have turned the death penalty into a grimly farcical process, feeding the cheapest arguments against it.

The attempted execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee showcases this fact. For full context, an 18-year-old Pike and an accomplice lured Colleen Slemmer into the woods, tortured her with a box cutter and a meat cleaver for about an hour, and then killed her by smashing her head with a chunk of asphalt. Pike kept a fragment of Slemmer’s skull as a trophy and bragged about it to other people. This was precisely the sort of depraved crime for which the death penalty was made.