The Death Penalty & Executions: The Crowd at the Scaffold
In 1757, Paris tore a man apart with horses while Casanova rented a window to watch. In 2026, Tennessee pushed two doses of pentobarbital into Christa Pike’s arms, closed a curtain, and failed to kill her. And a whole lot of people were furious that she lived.
Tonight we’re not coming for a killer. We’re coming for the audience. That includes you, and it definitely includes me.
Robin breaks down Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and Thomas Mathiesen’s “synopticon” in plain English: why the state moved executions behind walls, how surveillance taught us to police ourselves, and how the internet handed every one of us a seat at the scaffold. From Court TV to Karen Read, mugshot websites to Ring doorbells, Reddit’s Boston Marathon witch hunt to a tarot-reading TikToker hit with a $10 million defamation verdict, we look at what happens when the crowd stops watching punishment and starts choosing who gets punished.
Then we go inside the failed execution of Christa Pike at Riverbend in Nashville: the crime against 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, the childhood abuse Pike’s jury never heard about, the warnings the state ignored, the curtain that closed while witnesses listened to her breathe, and the doctor who now says the drug went into the tissue of her arms instead of her veins. Plus the Pentagon’s plan to livestream a firing squad, the politicians shopping for new ways to kill, and the bloodlust that came from the people you’d least expect.
The Reality Check is the most direct Robin has ever been: the science on deterrence, brain development, trauma, lethal injection, wrongful convictions, and victims’ families, and why cheering for an execution says more about us than about the person on the gurney.
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