近几周，美国执行死刑的方式两次遭遇严峻考验。9月30日，田纳西州处决克里斯塔·派克的行动出现失误，派克在接受两次戊巴比妥钠注射后幸存。八天后，国防部长皮特·赫格塞思兴高采烈地邀请全国民众通过直播观看尼达尔·哈桑的决死队枪决，该处决原定于12月3日进行。又过了一周，在引发轩然大波后，总统唐纳德·特朗普取消了直播。
In recent weeks, tolerance for the death penalty, as it is carried out in the United States, has been sorely tested twice. On September 30th, the state of Tennessee bungled its attempt to kill Christa Pike, who survived two injections of pentobarbital. Eight days later, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth gleefully invited the nation to tune in, via live stream, for the death by firing squad of Nidal Hasan, scheduled for December 3rd. It took another week for President Donald Trump to call off the broadcast, amid an uproar.
他在真实社交平台的一篇帖子中表示，虽然他认为直播能传递关于美国实力的有用信息，但他接受“许多非常出色且出于好意的人宁愿不观看”。他把这说得像是一种节目偏好，而非道德选择。
He said, in a Truth Social post, that, though he thought a live stream would send a useful message about America’s strength, he accepted that “many very good and well meaning people would rather not watch.”He made it sound like a programming preference, not a moral one.
派克的处决失误并未让田纳西州显得强大。尽管该事件未公开，但与死刑室相连的观察室里有人在场。其中一间坐着梅·马丁内斯，她是科琳·斯莱默的母亲。斯莱默1995年遇害时年仅十九岁，当时派克年仅十八岁，在两名青少年同伙的帮助下殴打并杀害了她。另一间观察室里坐着一群被指定为“媒体见证人”的记者。据记者称，当地时间7点26分，安装在大玻璃窗上的黑色帘幕被拉开，他们看到派克被绑在担架上。
Pike’s botched execution did not result in Tennessee looking strong. Though the event was not public, there were watch-rooms connected to the death chamber. In one sat May Martinez, the mother of Colleen Slemmer, who was nineteen years old when, in 1995, Pike, then eighteen, beat and killed her, with the help of two teen-age accomplices. A group of journalists, designated as “media witnesses,” sat in another. At 7:26 ., according to the journalists, a black curtain fitted to a large glass window was pulled back, and they saw Pike strapped to a gurney.
狱方人员此前已设置好静脉输液管道，并离开死刑室，从另一个房间开始输注戊巴比妥钠。
Prison personnel had already set I.V. lines and left the chamber to begin the flow of pentobarbital from yet another room.
通过麦克风，记者们听到派克说出她本应说的最后的话——关于爱——并在她的佛教精神顾问的陪伴下唱起歌来。随后，他们听到她询问她的手臂是否本该像现在这样疼痛——仿佛她的静脉就要爆裂。她抬起头，踢动双腿，把担架上的床单踢掉了。7:46 时，帘子被拉上。三分钟后帘子再次被拉开， presumably 为了让目击者看到第二剂备用药物的效果。
Through a microphone, the journalists listened as Pike spoke what were meant to be her last words—about love—and sang with her Buddhist spiritual adviser. Then they heard her ask if her arm was supposed to hurt as much as it did—as if her veins would burst. She raised her head and kicked her legs, knocking a sheet off the gurney. At 7:46 , the curtain was closed. It was opened three minutes later, presumably so that the witnesses could see the effects of a second, backup dose.
他们看到的是一个显然还活着的女人。8:05 时，帘子再次被拉上，但麦克风仍然开着，留给记者的是派克喘息和打鼾的声音。当他们在 8:53 时终于被告知可以离开时，他们相当确定派克还没有死。
What they saw was a woman who was clearly alive. At 8:05 ., the curtain closed again, but the microphone stayed on, leaving the journalists with the sound of Pike’s labored breathing and snoring. When, at 8:53 , they were finally told to go, they were pretty sure that Pike was not dead.
“我无论如何强调都不过分，刚刚发生的事情中，有多少是在幕后发生的，”纳什维尔的史蒂文·黑尔在事后的新闻发布会上说。在随后的日子里，更多细节浮出水面。据派克的律师称，在幕布拉开之前，医护人员在静脉输注方面遇到了困难，使用了至少七根针头。一种推测的理论是，输注管位置放错，或者血管破裂，导致戊巴比妥钠扩散到周围组织。
“I cannot emphasize enough how much of whatever just happened happened behind a closed curtain,” Steven Hale, of the Nashville , said at a press conference afterward. In the days that followed, more details came out. Before the curtain opened, according to Pike’s lawyers, medical workers had struggled with the I.V., using at least seven needles. A working theory is that a line was misplaced, or that a vein was blown, causing the pentobarbital to spread into the surrounding tissue.
派克的律师此前在法庭文件中警告称，她患有血液和循环系统疾病，面临着这种结果的风险。（他们还主张，派克儿童时期遭受的性暴力在判决时应得到更多重视。）注射死刑是美国最常见的死刑执行方式。然而，据美联社报道，自2009年以来，静脉输注问题已导致半打以上的执行行动受阻，其中包括今年5月田纳西州的一起案件。
Pike’s lawyers had warned, in court filings, that she had blood and circulatory conditions that put her at risk for precisely this outcome. (They have also argued that sexual violence Pike endured as a child should have weighed more heavily in her sentencing.) Lethal injection is the most common method of capital punishment in the U.S. And yet, according to the Associated Press, I.V. problems have derailed more than half a dozen executions since 2009, including one in Tennessee this past May.
派克的案件之所以引人注目，是因为执行团队仍然继续注射戊巴比妥钠。这一决定中的鲁莽程度无疑将成为田纳西州州长比尔·李下令调查的重点。李已推迟其他待执行的死刑，但尚未表示该州是否会再次尝试处决派克。派克在医院醒来前曾昏迷数天，醒来时感到困惑且疼痛，目前尚不清楚她是否能完全康复。上周，有消息称，监狱呼叫救护车的电话也处理不当。
Pike’s case stands out because the execution team proceeded with the injection of pentobarbital anyway. The level of recklessness in that decision will no doubt be a focus of the investigation that Bill Lee, the governor of Tennessee, has ordered. Lee has delayed other pending executions, but he has not yet said if the state will try again to kill Pike, who was unconscious for several days before waking up in a hospital, confused and in pain. It’s unclear if she will fully recover. Last week, it emerged that even the call from the prison for an ambulance was mishandled.
派克的律师将她所经历的事情描述为酷刑。一个无法回答的问题是，如果没有人在场，那个夜晚会以何种方式结束。
Pike’s lawyers have described what happened to her as torture. An unanswerable question is how the night might have ended had no one been watching.
当然，坚持要求公开见证与刻意制造一场“表演”之间是有区别的。赫格斯思在美国“亚伯拉罕·林肯”号航空母舰的甲板上，接受右翼网红杰克·波索比克的采访时大力宣传直播这一做法。2009年，在即将被派往阿富汗之前，前陆军少校兼精神科医生哈桑在胡德堡军事基地开枪杀死了12名战友（其中一人当时正怀着孕）以及一名平民。
There is a distinction, of course, between insisting on witnesses and staging a spectacle. Hegseth promoted the live stream in an interview with Jack Posobiec, a right-wing influencer, on the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. Hasan, a former Army major and psychiatrist, shot and killed twelve fellow-soldiers (one of whom was pregnant) and a civilian at Fort Hood, in 2009, ahead of a deployment to Afghanistan.
赫格斯思说道：“这根本无需犹豫，就该用行刑队处决他。而且我们一定会确保民众能够观看，让这一切公开进行。”近九十年来，美国再未举行过公开处决。哈桑如今只能坐轮椅行动，那场枪击事件导致他瘫痪。他曾表示自己渴望成为殉道者，而赫格斯思的计划存在的诸多问题之一便是：该计划或许会助他如愿以偿。但更为严重的问题是，直播行刑必然会引发那种低俗至极、近乎死亡崇拜般的狂欢氛围。
“No-brainer. Execution by firing squad,” Hegseth said. “And we’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public.”There hasn’t been a public execution in the United States in almost ninety years. Hasan is confined to a wheelchair; he was paralyzed as a result of the firefight that ended his shooting spree. He has said that he wants to be a martyr, and one of the many problems with Hegseth’s plan was that it might have helped him get his wish. But the more profound issue was the grubby death-cult revelry that a live stream would entail.
就连一些死刑支持者，包括不少共和党议员，似乎也对这一设想感到反感。近年来，已知仅有少数国家会实施公开处决，最典型的便是伊朗和阿富汗。而在经合组织旗下的38个成员国中，只有美国和日本仍定期执行死刑。（未加入经合组织的中国同样执行死刑。）美国宪法第八修正案禁止“残酷且不合常理的刑罚”；最高法院虽长期认定死刑合法，但也逐步收紧了相关适用标准。
Even some supporters of capital punishment, including a number of Republican lawmakers, seemed repelled by the prospect. In recent years, only a few countries have been known to conduct public executions, notably Iran and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, of the thirty-eight nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, only two—the U.S. and Japan—regularly carry out death sentences at all. (China, which is not in the O.E.C.D., does, too.) The Eighth Amendment forbids “cruel and unusual punishments”; the Supreme Court has long said that the death penalty is permissible, even as it has gradually tightened its standard. In 1988, for example, the Court banned the death penalty for crimes committed by someone under the age of sixteen.
例如，1988年最高法院禁止对未满16岁者所犯下的罪行判处死刑；直到2005年，这一年龄限制才被提高至18岁。不过，这些调整虽值得肯定，却无法掩盖死刑本身的残酷本质；派克案与哈桑案恰恰表明：常规处决与令人难以忍受的处决之间，界限其实极其模糊。
The Justices only raised the age to eighteen in 2005. But such adjustments, welcome as they are, cannot conceal the essential brutality of the enterprise; the Pike and Hasan cases show how vanishingly fine the line is between a routine execution and an unbearable one.
当国土安全部长马克韦恩·马林被问及赫格塞思的直播——在特朗普叫停之前——时，他说：“没人非得看。”在TikTok和自动播放视频的时代，这话根本不成立。但马林的回答似乎也传达出一种希望：没人会注意到这届政府的行为和品格，以及像赫格塞思这样的官员——他们似乎对自己最糟糕的本能毫无羞耻之心。人不可能总是把目光移开。
When Markwayne Mullin, the Secretary of Homeland Security, was asked about Hegseth’s live stream before Trump called it off, he said, “No one has to watch.”In the age of TikTok and autoplay videos, that’s simply not true. But Mullin’s reply also seemed to convey a hope that no one would notice the actions and the character of this Administration, with officials, such as Hegseth, who appear unashamed of their worst instincts. One can’t always look away.