Ongoing Legal Contributor Harold Michael Harvey Presents "When the State Cannot Kill Cleanly - Justice is Out of Balance"

 

Photo: AI-generated depicting justice out of balance.

When the State Cannot Kill Cleanly - Justice is Out of Balance

I have spent much of my life thinking about death, not in the abstract, but in the way the state prepares to take a human life in the name of justice. For two decades, I worked as a criminal defense lawyer in Georgia. When I closed my practice, I had successfully defended five Black men from execution in the Georgia electric chair, the capital punishment method in use in the last century. I fought those cases hard because I did not want to stand inside the execution chamber in Jackson, Georgia.

And for all those years, I never did, not until I went as a layman to protest the execution of Troy Davis on September 11, 2011, a moment that still sits heavy on my spirit. In nine days, Troy Davis would have turned 59 years old.

I have been a lifelong opponent of capital punishment. Only once did I ever believe the death penalty might be morally justified. It was in the Dylann Roof case, where Roof murdered 15 members of a Bible study group at the Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 15, 2015. The church had invited
him in for solace. Even then, I felt the weight of the question, not the righteousness of the answer.

Tonight, as I read the NBC News report on Tennessee’s failed execution of Christa Gail Pike, I am troubled in a way that reaches back through every capital case I ever handled.

Because what Tennessee attempted was not an execution. It was a collapse of state power. Simply put, a process the state could not control.

The facts are stark. Witnesses reported that executioners injected both syringes of lethal injection chemicals, yet Pike “has not lost consciousness and still has a heartbeat.” Journalists heard her say, “My arm feels like it’s about to burst open” at 7:34 p.m. They saw her kicking her feet, snoring, and knocking off the sheets laid on her body. At times, the curtain was closed, and journalists could only hear sounds.

Twice, officials closed the curtains, hiding the process from public view.

An ambulance arrived at the prison and then left again as medical aid was administered inside the death chamber. Even the victim’s mother, who wanted the execution carried out, said simply: “It was a mess.”

This was Tennessee’s second failed execution this year. In
May, executioners could not find a vein for Tony Carruthers, forcing a one‑year reprieve.

When a state cannot reliably carry out its gravest punishment, the punishment itself becomes morally indefensible. I have seen this system from the inside. I defended men the state intended to kill. I sat in rooms where prosecutors spoke casually about death. I sat with families who feared the phone call that would end their world. I sat with clients failed by every institution long before they ever met me. I saw the relief in their eyes when death was taken off the table.

In 2011, I felt the collective weight of protesters who had waited all day for a phone call from Justice Clarence Thomas that could save Troy Davis’s life. I’m still haunted by the collective murmur that erupted in the crowd when Ben Jealous announced that Thomas denied Davis’s last appeal, then Raphael Warnock emerged from the death chamber with the words, it is finished.

I also sat in policy discussions when Georgia considered eliminating electrocution in favor of lethal injection. We argued that capital punishment was cruel and unusual under all circumstances. The prevailing argument then was that lethal injection would be “more humane,” “more predictable,” and “less traumatic” for everyone involved.

But the Pike attempt shows what I suspected even then: the state cannot guarantee a humane death, not with electricity, not with chemicals, and not with any method that relies on human hands, human judgment, and human fallibility. As the Pike case shows, the body does not always cooperate.

The state’s spokesperson insisted Tennessee “followed every step of the State’s lawful, established execution. They insisted Tennessee “followed every step of the State’s lawful, established execution protocol” and that the chemical “has consistently been effective.”

But the human body is not a protocol. It is not a machine. It does not always respond to chemicals the way the state expects.

When Pike remained conscious, breathing, and in pain after both syringes were administered, the state’s claim of “consistency” collapsed.

Let’s be clear, trauma cannot be separated from the process. Pike’s lawyers argued that being strapped down would trigger “severe mental suffering and superadded psychological terror” because she had been molested and raped beginning in early childhood: trauma the state did not dispute at a recent hearing.

Even if the chemicals had worked perfectly, the psychological harm was already built into the process. A humane execution is impossible when the process itself recreates the trauma that shaped the defendant’s life.

Here is the moral question we cannot avoid.

I defended men the state intended to kill because I believed, and still believe, that the death penalty is a power too great for any government to wield. It requires perfection from inherently imperfect institutions. It requires certainty from systems built on human judgment. It requires control over a process that cannot be fully controlled.

The Pike attempt proves this again. If the state cannot kill cleanly, it should not kill at all.

When I stood outside the prison in Jackson to protest the execution of Troy Davis, I felt the weight of every client I had ever defended. I felt the weight of every mistake the justice system has ever made. And I felt the weight of the question that has followed me my entire career:

What does it do to a society when the state kills in its name?

Tonight, Tennessee answered that question in the worst possible way. It showed us that the death penalty is not justice. It is not closure. It is not control. It is a system that fails publicly, painfully, and predictably.

When the state fails at killing, everyone involved carries the burden: the condemned, the victims’ families, the witnesses, the courts, and the society that allows it. I have spent my life fighting this system. Tonight reminds me why.

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Harold Michael Harvey is an award-winning photojournalist and a two-time award-winning author. He is a 2026 Barrier Beakers Award Honoree, presented by the James Wimberly Institute for Black Studies & History, for his book Fantasy Five: The Election of Macon’s First Black Councilmembers. Please follow him at www.haroldmichaelharvey.com and haroldmichaelharvey.com.substack.com.

My friend always has the right words to pinpoint many important issues. I personally have mixed feelings about capital punishment, especially as pinpointed by Harvey for serial crime actions, when I see so many deaths being, seemingly, performed by the government itself: Minnesota murders in our streets, murder of unknown people in South America waters, and, of course, the deadly war on Iran which was not approved by anybody... Especially when a supreme court has given this president total immunity while he's in office! Can we afford to allow any deaths, even seemingly justified, to this government as being immuned???

Harold Michael Harvey, Ongoing Legal Contributor and Friend Calls for Courage, Endurance, and Faith to Fight Once Again White Supremachists!

 

Elaine Harvey, now 97, as an 18-year-old, rode her bicycle to register to vote.

Before I speak about the Supreme Court’s recent ruling, I must begin where my family’s voting story truly begins with my third grandfather, Joseph Harvey, who registered to vote in 1868 during Reconstruction. He stepped forward in that brief window when America seemed willing to imagine Black citizenship as real and enforceable. But after Reconstruction collapsed, no one in my family voted again until my mother, an 18‑year‑old Black girl in rural Georgia studying history at Fort Valley State College, cast her ballot in the 1948 Presidential election, culminating eighty years of silence, eighty years of fear, and eighty years of democracy denied

The Supreme Court’s recent ruling prohibiting the use of race in drawing congressional districts is not an isolated legal decision. It is part of a much longer American story, one that stretches from Reconstruction to Jim Crow, from the 1965 Voting Rights Act to the present moment. And if you know that story, you recognize the pattern immediately.

Every time Black Americans have gained political power, the system has found new ways to take it back. I know this not just from books or archives. I know it because my own family lived it.

In the late 1940s, my mother was an 18‑year‑old Black girl in rural Georgia who wanted to register to vote. Her father refused to take her to town. Not because he didn’t believe in voting, but because he feared the Klan would burn his house down or slaughter the family if they saw him escorting a young Black woman to the voter registrar in the courthouse.

So, she rode her bicycle, alone, unprotected, determined, and teased by her siblings and cousins who did not yet understand the importance of voting.

When she arrived, the white registrar handed her a copy of the U.S. Constitution and said, “Read this.” He expected her to stumble. She didn’t. She recited it verbatim, without looking down.

“I said read it,” he barked.

She read it with perfect diction. He snatched the book from her hands before she could finish the first paragraph. Then he shoved a sheet of paper toward her and said, “Sign this.” She did, becoming the first member of the family to register to vote since President Hayes removed the federal troops from Georgia.

That was the price of Black citizenship in the American South: humiliation, danger, and the constant threat of violence. And yet she persisted.

Fast forward to 1970. I was an 18‑year‑old student at Tuskegee Institute. Between classes one noonday, my brother and I walked down to the Macon County Courthouse to register. I grew up hearing my mom recount those harrowing moments in the Crawford County, Georgia, Courthouse. I expected a fight. I expected a test. I expected the same hostility my mother faced.

But the registrar handed us an application. Five years had passed since President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. Five years, and the world had changed.

That fall, I cast my first vote for Johnny Ford, the city’s first Black mayor. That moment was not an accident. It was not a gift. It was the direct result of federal protection, the Voting Rights Act doing exactly what it was designed to do.

Without the 1965 Voting Rights Act, neither my mother nor her progenies would have been able to participate fully in American democracy. We were denied all the rights and privileges of being Americans. For generations, Black voters were packed, cracked, diluted, and erased through district lines drawn with surgical precision. Racial gerrymandering, when used to remedy discrimination, was not a distortion of democracy. It was a correction.

It was the only way to counteract a century of maps designed to ensure Black people could not elect candidates of their choice. The Supreme Court understood this in 1965. It was understood in 1982. It was understood in 1986. It was understood in 2023.

But in 2026, the Court declared that race cannot be used in drawing districts, even when race was the very tool used to deny Black political power in the first place.

At the same time, the Court continues to allow partisan gerrymandering, even though in the South, race and party are deeply intertwined. A map drawn to disadvantage Democrats will almost always disadvantage Black voters. The Court knows this. Everyone knows this. This reality is unlikely to change until the Republican Party changes its public policy initiatives towards Black and Brown people.

The result is a legal paradox with devastating real‑world consequences: You may not use race to remedy discrimination, but you may use the party to entrench it. This is not neutrality. This is not colorblindness. This is a rollback. The kind of rollback that Rev. Dr. Joseph Lowery, then President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, railed against when President Ronald Regan nominated Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987. Thirty-nine years later, the Supreme Court now has the numbers to turn back the clock and make America the exclusive domain of White men.

The Supreme Court’s ruling does not simply reinterpret the law. It reopens the door to the very practices the Voting Rights Act was designed to eliminate. It rolls back the clock on gains Black Americans have fought for since the end of enslavement.

My mother’s bicycle ride. My walk to the courthouse in 1970. The election of Black mayors, councilmembers, legislators, senators, and representatives across the South. All of it was made possible by federal protections that the Court is now dismantling piece by piece.

We have seen this pattern before: Reconstruction, Redemption, Jim Crow, The Civil Rights Movement, Shelby County v. Holder, and now Louisiana v. Callais.

The arc of voting rights in America is not a straight line. It is a struggle, a push-and-pull between progress and retrenchment.

The Court’s ruling does not erase the courage of those who fought for the vote. It does not erase the memory of my mother standing in that courthouse, or the registrar who tried to break her spirit, so she would not teach children she would later have the importance of voting. It does not erase the pride I felt voting for Tuskegee’s first Black mayor.

But it does remind us that rights won can be rights lost, and that the work of democracy is never finished.

If the Court will not protect the franchise, then the people must. If the law retreats, memory must advance. If the arc bends backward, we must bend forward.

Because the story of Black voting rights in America is not just a legal story. It is a family story. It is a community story. It is a story written in courage, danger, persistence, and hope. It is a story we must continue to tell, especially now.

May the courage of those who came before us, from Joseph Harvey in 1868, to my mother on her bicycle in 1948, to every Black voter who stood in a courthouse line with danger at their back, guide us in this moment. May their steadiness become our strategy, their endurance our inheritance, and their faith in democracy our mandate. The struggle did not begin with us, and it must not end with us. May we walk forward carrying their light.

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When you wake up each morning and there is only more and more news about the devastation happening in the United States and across the world because of rich power-hungry white men, there can be no different response for me than to wonder - How are they getting away with this madness! How can you have a constitution that has existed for hundreds of years, yet allow, little by little, the corruption of the people who have worked behind the scenes to gain control, using private money of those who want only one thing--to be more powerful, and to do anything they want... 

You know folks, up until 2015, I thought I did anything I wanted... But my needs and desires are minimal... Having a good book to read and a cat or two to provide warmth and comfort was sufficient for it was in accordance with what God has provided for us throughout our lives. Sure it was hard growing up, with only my mother working to provide for 4 children. But we made it through...

And there was always somebody worse off than we were... 

I met Marian Davis when I was in the 7th grade and we became friends right away. She was the first Black individual I got to know personally. That she was Black was never an issue--and it was like that all of my life, up until a man whose father had taught him to hate had run for political office and immediately started lying to people... I had already interacted with a number of white men in power who were more concerned about being "in command" than in my getting my job done... It was a lesson that immediately prepared me to question just how a man such as the obvious racist was actually elected into the president's position!

But nothing could have prepared us for what has occurred since the first day of his second term! Not even the MAGA group who voted him in and are now facing, along with the rest of us, just how much he actually meant when he said he wanted to make our country great again...

You know what I mean...before Black people could vote and/or hold public office... And, soon, I'll predict, the'll be trying to do it to women as well... I was an Affirmative Action female and saw what happened to women at that time... There was also the stirring of resentment from white men when a Black man was hired for a job he had applied for. Key was that they didn't care why the affirmative action, equal pay for equal work, and all the other laws that came into existence which required them to "work to earn promotions" rather than the good ole boy process that was the rule at that time...

The thing is, folks, is that there is more hate than any of us ever imagined. There are many who have no background in any form of religion, but there has been a major change for many who claim they are Christian, while, at the same time, are willing to turn against those who are different in some way. It's wrong and we who learned and listened to the call to Love Our Neighbors and did so, can't imagine why all of this is happening... Especially when they use religion as a reason for their violence and other criminal goals of more and more money than they could ever spend...

In any event, clearly the Supreme Court has also joined the move to control by illegal actions, such as granting immunity for anything and everything done by the president while in office--what nonsense! Just the one thing, the destruction of a historically preserved White House to please one man makes it quite clear that the United States government is out of control...

And voting to stop a political party from destroying our democracy is the only answer... 

I was hoping and watching for Michael to write about what is happening. I've added a number of videos for documentation, such as stopping an election that has already started, claiming it was an emergency...  His wisdom and strength speaks out for all of us... Thank you for sharing your family's history, about the fear of actually taking the advantage to vote... It is certainly understandable, especially seeing how this president has gone after any non-white people here and around the world...

Please remember that we are All God's Children!

Gabby