America lectures Africa on death penalty while bringing back firing squads: The Christa Pike shame

This week, the whole world stopped to watch Tennessee try to kill a woman.

On September 30, the State of Tennessee strapped 50-year-old Christa Pike to a gurney, pumped her with two doses of pentobarbital, and tried to execute her.

The execution failed. The drug leaked into her flesh, burned and blistered both her arms, and left her alive, unconscious, fighting for life in hospital.

Pike became a household name again. The world remembered that she was sentenced to death at 20, that she has spent 30 years on death row, that Tennessee has not executed a woman in over 200 years.

And immediately, the international human rights bodies that advocate for the end of the death penalty made their voice loud.

The World Coalition Against the Death Penalty in France, the United Nations Special Rapporteurs, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and Amnesty International all condemned Tennessee and demanded Governor Bill Lee commute her sentence.

Amnesty International USA called it “an extreme display of cruelty” and said “there is no humane way for the state to kill someone.”

They are right. But here is the question we must ask in Malawi today.

America, which claims to be the world’s advocate for democracy and human rights, which funds governance projects in Lilongwe and lectures us about constitutionalism, had its own provinces and governors signing death warrants like autographs in 2025 and 2026.

In 2025 alone, Amnesty recorded 2,707 executions worldwide, with the United States executing 47 people – the highest since 2009.

Is the death penalty illegal only in Africa?

The hard truth is that while Malawi is praised for abolishing the death penalty, America is expanding it.

The hard truth is that on October 5, 2026, President Donald Trump approved execution by firing squad.

This is not a rumour. The Pentagon announced it officially. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth recommended and President Trump approved death by U.S. Army firing squad for Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter who killed 13 people in 2009.

The execution is set for December 3, 2026, at Fort Hood. It will be the first military execution by firing squad since World War II, the first military execution of any kind since 1961.

Trump’s administration has also added electrocution and gas asphyxiation as permissible federal execution methods because they cannot get lethal injection drugs.

While we in Africa are being told to abolish, America is bringing back methods we thought belonged to medieval history.

I condemn it. Completely.

How can America keep moral authority to tell Malawi, Zambia, Sierra Leone to abolish the death penalty, when its own governors are pausing executions only after they botch them, and its President is signing firing squad orders with pride?

How can Amnesty International enforce this abolition agenda in Africa more aggressively than it enforces it in the USA?

The hard truth is that Amnesty International pressures African governments through aid conditionality, EU statements, and constitutional court cases – and we listen. Malawi abolished death penalty in 2021 after pressure, even though we had not executed anyone since 1992 under Banda, and Bakili Muluzi refused to sign warrants since 1994. We obeyed.

But in America, Amnesty issues statements and governors ignore them. Tennessee botched Christa Pike and still has not commuted her sentence. The same state botched an execution in May. Yet executions continue.

Let’s come back to Christa Pike – because she is the catchy story that exposes the cruelty.

The hard truth is that Christa Pike has already suffered enough and deserves forgiveness.

She was 18 when the crime happened in 1995. She was abused as a child, dropped out of school, suffered brain damage and mental illness.

She has spent 30 years in a 6 by 9 feet cell on death row – that is 10,950 days waiting to die. That is torture before execution.

Then the state tried to kill her and failed, leaving her swollen, burned, blistered, on life support.

What more punishment does a human being need? If the death penalty is meant to be punishment, not torture, then surely 30 years plus a botched execution is more than enough justice.

The hard truth is that Malawi understood this Ubuntu principle when our traditional leaders told Cornell University researchers that people can change and prison is for reform. That is why we stopped killing our own.

If death penalty is cruel, inhuman and degrading in Malawi, it is cruel, inhuman and degrading in Tennessee and in Fort Hood.

You cannot have one standard for Africa and firing squads for America.

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