History, Politics, the Death Penalty and Restorative Justice

The following are comments from the Restorative Justice International podcast which aired on November 2, 2026.

It is an honor to be on this podcast, especially with people who have been doing the hard work of death penalty abolition, and those I have worked with years ago in the anti-death penalty movement.

I’m David Love, RJI global advisory board member and Journalism and Media Studies professor at Rutgers. My areas of focus are race, politics, human rights, social justice and criminal justice.

I want to provide my thoughts on the Christa Pike attempted execution and the return to federal executions by firing squad, which are both connected through history and politics and point to the underlying problem with the death penalty.

The death penalty represents the violence of the settler colonial state that is the United States. America is based on the genocide of indigenous people and the trafficking and enslavement of African people. Bad habits are hard to break, and this country has not come to terms with its legacy of violence and trauma, and so we can’t heal. Structurally, the death penalty is the continuation of a history of racialized violence.

During slavery times, capital punishment was a tool of social control. It was used to protect the property rights of white people, their right to own Black people as chattel, control Black people and quash slave insurrections.

After emancipation and Reconstruction, white supremacist lynch mobs terrorized the Black community with extrajudicial lynchings. Thousands of people, mostly Black, were lynched in the South in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These were ritualized murder, entertainment spectacles, excursions. Tickets were sold; newspapers announced the lynchings. White people brought their families and had picnic lunches to see the Black person hanged, beaten, shot, burned, mutilated. Body parts of the black victim were collected as souvenirs.

With pressure from the anti-lynching movement and federal pressure, Southern states began transitioning from public lynch mobs to bringing the lynch mobs into the courtroom. Lynchings were cleaned up and brought into the legal system, made respectable through state-sanctioned “legal lynchings” – hasty kangaroo trials with all-white juries, a quick guilty verdict and a speedy execution. Capital punishment still served the same purpose, social control to keep Black folks in line.

The racism and white supremacy continue and it’s clear. People sentenced to death are disproportionately Black and Latinx. The states that committed lynchings of Black people, the Confederacy and Jim Crow states, tend to be the most aggressive and enthusiastic death penalty states.

Now, I’d like to apply all of this to the thankfully failed execution of Christa Pike and the return to firing squads on the federal level.

First, Christa Pike. Lethal injections were supposed to be an antiseptic, humane, cleaner form of execution. But there is no such thing as a humane and cruelty-free execution, the way there is no humane lynching. Medical boards and the Hippocratic oath bar doctors and nurses from administering lethal injections, and doing so would turn them into Dr. Mengele, the Nazi doctor who performed “medical experiments” and was known as the “Angel of Death” at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.

And it is not lost on me that Christa Pike is a white woman. It is ironic that the botched execution of a white woman has brought attention to the evil of state violence often reserved for Black and brown people, but ultimately violence that can take us all. It reminds me of how Viola Liuzzo, a white woman from Detroit, was shot and killed by the Klan in 1965, and how Renee Nicole Good, a white queer woman, and Alex Pretti, a VA intensive care nurse was murdered by ICE in Minneapolis early this year.

Next, I want to discuss the firing squad. It is fitting that this would happen under Trump. In 1989, when five Black and Puerto Rican teens were wrongfully arrested, convicted and imprisoned for the rape and beating of white woman jogger in Central Park in New York City, Trump placed an ad in the major New York newspapers calling for the return of the death penalty in New York. That ad helped create an atmosphere leading to the wrongful convictions of these young men, who spent between 5 and 13 years in prison for crimes they didn’t commit.

The firing squad brings back the sense of spectacle and ritualized – and racialized – violence that lynchings provide. It’s no accident that the administration had hoped to execute former U.S. Army Major Nidal Hasan via live-streamed firing squad for the Fort Hood mass shooting. As a Palestinian American Muslim man paralyzed, and in a wheelchair, Hasan provided the perfect target. And yet, public outrage killed their plans. This white nationalist administration thrives on the use of state violence and racial violence to reinforce the American racial hierarchy – with ICE storm troopers, concentration camps, the war on DEI, wars on melanated people, and more. In 1927, Trump’s father was arrested at a KKK rally in Queens New York, and Trump is continuing that legacy of white supremacy – although I believe this is the last gasp of a dying white supremacy.