Wednesday night, the State of Tennessee tried to execute Christa Pike and failed. Officials gave her two doses of pentobarbital. According to her lawyers and the media witnesses, she was still breathing, and witnesses reported hearing her snore for close to an hour. She was taken to a hospital. Governor Bill Lee halted the one remaining execution of the year and ordered an outside review.
I support the death penalty. I also think Tennessee has repeatedly shown that it cannot administer it the way it is set up today.
Let’s review what Christa Pike did in Knoxville as I traveled for my first college classes with my mom driving me.
In January 1995, she was 18 and a student at the Knoxville Job Corps center. She believed a fellow student, 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, threatened her relationship with her boyfriend. She lured Colleen to a wooded part of the University of Tennessee’s agricultural campus. Prosecutors said she cut Colleen with a box cutter and beat her with a chunk of asphalt. She and her boyfriend carved a pentagram into Colleen’s chest, and by trial testimony, she kept a piece of Colleen’s skull. She was convicted in 1996 and sentenced to death. There is no doubt about who did it.
Thirty-one years later, Colleen’s mother and stepfather traveled to Nashville to watch the sentence carried out. A federal appeals panel stopped it an hour before it began. The Supreme Court lifted that stay hours later. Then the state failed to finish the job.
I got my driver’s license the year Christa Pike was convicted of murder. I am 46 years old now. In the time it took me to grow up, build a career, and raise children, the State of Tennessee did not carry out a sentence its own courts had imposed. Colleen Slemmer was 19. She never got a career, a family, or a thirtieth birthday, let alone a forty-sixth. The state’s failure Wednesday night ended a thirty-year pattern.
Pike’s lawyers argue that she was abused as a child and that her jury never fully heard that evidence. Abuse is real mitigation, and a jury should weigh it. A jury did, and it sentenced her to death anyway. Tennessee’s courts and a federal district court have rejected her claims since then, and the Supreme Court declined to review the case in 2020. Thirty years of appeals is not a lack of process. It is an absurdly bloated and lengthy process. The suggestion that her history means the state should keep her locked up for life at taxpayer expense, or let her out, does not hold up against what she did.
Read the coverage, and the framing is the same everywhere. She was 18. She was abused. She would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in 200 years. Take every claim about her childhood as true. Abuse is a real wrong done to her, and it does not make murder allowed.
Given years in a cell, Pike tried to kill again. In 2001, she strangled a fellow inmate with a shoestring and nearly killed her. She was convicted of attempted first-degree murder in 2004, and the conviction added 25 years to a sentence she was already serving. In 2012, prison officials foiled an escape attempt. In the AP’s coverage, the attempted murder takes one sentence. It almost never reaches a headline. Tennessee did not handle this murderer well long before Wednesday night.
A majority of Americans still support the death penalty. Gallup’s most recent poll, in October 2025, put it at 52 percent. Those of us who do are not confused about what we are supporting. A woman who lured a 19-year-old into the woods, carved a pentagram into her chest with her boyfriend, beat her with a piece of asphalt, and by trial testimony carried off a piece of her skull is not misunderstood. We know what evil is, and we know what it deserves from a state that, in the words of Romans 13, does not bear the sword in vain. Tennessee carried that sword for thirty years and could not use it.
Are there death penalty cases with legitimate questions? Yes. Mistaken identity, weak confessions, thin forensic evidence, and an intellectually disabled defendant all deserve every review the law allows. But when we have an open and shut murder, is there a cadre of lawyers and judges who hate the death penalty, who use every lever the system gives them to waste enormous taxpayer resources, and who prolong the pain of families waiting for justice? Absolutely. Tennessee entitles every capital defendant to two attorneys and layers on mandatory review at every level. Knoxville state senator Richard Briggs, a supporter of capital punishment, put the legal fees at $600,000 before an execution was even reached. That was in 2016, for the system in general, and a decade of litigation has passed since. The state’s own Comptroller has documented that capital cases cost more than life sentences. We pay that premium and are still seeing failure at the end.
Now the method. Lethal injection worked in this country for decades. Tennessee’s last two attempts did not. In May, the execution team could not place a central line for Tony Carruthers, and Governor Lee gave him a one-year reprieve. On Wednesday, the drugs failed to kill Pike. Those are different failures, and the state’s record includes a third. In 2022, Lee halted Oscar Smith’s execution about an hour before it was to happen because the state had not tested its drugs as its own protocol required. The Department of Correction says it followed every step of its protocol on Wednesday. I hope the outside review answers one question directly: did anyone interfere? A state that cannot answer that cannot keep promising families justice.
If the method is the problem, change the method. I have long thought the guillotine makes sense. It does not depend on a vein, a drug supplier, or a chemical that has to be tested. France used it until 1977. No American jurisdiction authorizes it today, so this is a proposal, not a current option. But Tennessee already lets inmates sentenced before 1999 choose the electric chair. The state has never treated lethal injection as the only acceptable method.
This debacle also makes me think of Luigi Mangione. He is charged with murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a Manhattan sidewalk in December 2024, and he has pleaded not guilty. A federal judge threw out the federal counts that carried the death penalty, the Justice Department chose not to appeal, and New York has no death penalty. So he will not be executed. If a jury convicts him on what the evidence appears to show, a premeditated killing carried out on a public street, I believe he should be. Nearly two years later, the case is still moving through hearings, scheduling fights, and evidentiary rulings. That is not how the death penalty should work.
Here is how it should work. Reserve it for the cases where guilt is beyond question: video, a confession, DNA. Give those cases one full, fair round of review, with a hard clock. Execute the sentence with a method that works. If a state will not do that, it is delivering something less than justice. Evildoers are not terrified of the sword when the state does not bear it as it should as an instrument of wrath. Families like Colleen Slemmer’s have waited long enough for a promise to be kept, and what Tennessee delivered on Wednesday was a second failure to keep it.
