Breda O'Brien: Ireland may not have the death penalty, but we have no reason for complacency

One of Christa Pike’s swollen and blistered arms and both her feet were shackled as she lay in hospital after two doses of lethal injection in Tennessee that failed to have their intended effect. She is now walking with assistance and eating normally . The state may still follow through with the execution. In The Irish Times, Keith Duggan has outlined her unrelentingly grim childhood . Born to an alcoholic mother, Pike has foetal alcohol syndrome, was neglected and brutally beaten in childhood, sexually abused from the age of two and subjected separately to at least three rapes by the age of 17. She attempted suicide aged 12 after the death of her grandmother, the only person Pike believed really loved her. Nothing excuses the prolonged torture and death that Pike and Tadaryl Shipp, her abusive gang-member boyfriend at the time, inflicted on 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. But because Shipp was 17, just a year younger than Pike, he avoided the death penalty, and is now eligible for parole. Shadolla Peterson, who acted as lookout for Shipp and Pike, was given probation because she testified against them. Pike was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in prison. Since being medicated, she has had no further history of perpetrating violence. She expressed remorse for the murder and became a Buddhist. According to her spiritual adviser, Rev Mikey Noechel, Pike went to her supposed execution practising metta, the Buddhist loving-kindness meditation. Other prisoners record her many small acts of kindness to them. Pike has already spent 30 years on death row, and 28 years in what has amounted to solitary confinement. It was not until 2024 that her legal counsel secured her the right to mix with other women in the general prison population. Men always had that right, but as the only woman on death row, she was kept confined for 22-23 hours a day in a 7ft by 12ft cell. The US may not be Iran , where by July this year, 980 people, including 37 political prisoners, 18 women, and one juvenile offender, had been executed – or China , where figures are a State secret, but suspected to be in the thousands. Nonetheless, the continued use of capital punishment, including firing squads, means the US is far outside the global trend towards universal abolition of the death penalty. On Friday, the US announced plans to livestream the execution by firing squad , which is planned for December, of a gunman who killed 13 people in 2009 . Nidal Hasan is set to become the first person ​to be executed by firing squad by the US military since 1945. Irish people have never been great enthusiasts for capital punishment. Before his violent death in 1922, even Michael Collins supported a move to abolish it. The Civil War put paid to abolition. Nonetheless, hangmen such as the notorious Pierrepoints had to be imported from Britain because no Irish person, despite attempts to train one , would do it . We abolished the death penalty for murder in 1964 and passed a referendum in 2001 to prevent its reintroduction. Achieving a balance between retribution and reintegration of those who have served their time is never easy Wrongful convictions are one powerful argument against capital punishment. Harry Gleeson was reinterred in Holycross, Tipperary, two years ago – 83 years after he was wrongfully convicted and hanged for a murder . The large and sombre crowd which gathered reflected how strongly people felt about the injustice. While we may no longer have State-sanctioned killing of prisoners, we still have few reasons for complacency. Life sentences are considered a humane alternative to the death penalty. Yet life sentences have been creeping up in length for decades, from an admittedly low average of 7.5 years in the 1970s and 1980s, to 24 years in 2023. For prisoners granted parole in the Republic between 2022 and 2025, t ime served in custody ranged from 16 to 43.6 years . The number of prisoners serving life has also risen. This may reflect increasingly brutal crimes, but it also stems from significant understaffing of the Parole Board, only established in 2019. Processing an application takes 18 months. The slow turnaround on mandatory reports from State agencies, such as An Garda Síochána, the Probation Service and the Irish Prison Service ’s Psychology Service, is one major bottleneck. This slow pace contributes to chronic prison overcrowding, although short sentences for much more minor offences contribute far more to the problem. Conditions for the general prison population are dire. Chief Inspector of Prisons, Mark Kelly, branded it a “national disgrace” that 599 prisoners were forced to sleep on mattresses on the floor. The Irish Penal Reform Trust reports that 65 per cent of prisoners were unable to use the toilet in private due to cell sharing. Prisons are not only devoid of privacy and dignity, but they also rely on restricted regimes, which often amount to solitary confinement. Part of that is driven by requests from prisoners themselves, especially gang members, but the Council of Europe Committee for the Prevention of Torture found that the 22-23 hours a day spent in lock-up without meaningful activities “may amount to inhuman and degrading treatment”. Families of victims often understandably resent so much focus on prisoners’ rights. Prisoners convicted of murder can apply for parole after 12 years and every two years after. Although victims’ families have statutory rights to be heard since 2019, they still often find the process frightening, draining and retraumatising. Achieving a balance between retribution and reintegration of those who have served their time is never easy. But even in the absence of the death penalty, we are still far from a penal system that respects the rights of everyone.