Christa Pike and the Absurdity of Humane Execution

Save this storySave this storySave this storyDoctors in Tennessee are attempting to save the life of a woman whom the state just tried to kill. “Kafkaesque” is a term so overused that it has become a banality, but how else can one characterize the chain of events that occurred on September 30th?

Christa Pike was eighteen years old when she murdered her classmate, Colleen Slemmer, in 1995. A year later, she became the youngest woman to receive a death sentence in the modern era. This past Wednesday, at 8:17 A.M., an hour or so before the now fifty-year-old Pike was scheduled to be executed, an appeals court granted her legal team’s request for a stay of execution “to properly analyze the parties’ fully briefed arguments and resolve the issues on the merits.” By late afternoon, the Supreme Court, which had denied her a stay earlier in the week, vacated it. At Riverbend—a maximum-security prison in Nashville where Pike, the only woman on Tennessee’s death row, has long been held—there were media witnesses, prison personnel, lawyers, Slemmer’s mother, and a spiritual adviser gathered. Pike said her last words, an offering of love to those who loved her and those who hated her, and prepared. A doctor sent a rivulet of pentobarbital through her left arm. Pike remained conscious, though, and spoke, asking whether it was normal that her arm felt like it might burst. A second syringe was administered. Pike appeared to lose consciousness, but was observed to be snoring, indicating that she was still breathing. An hour crept by. She did not die. Lawyers made emergency calls, and a decision was made to halt the proceedings, which had lost the veneer of sobriety and had tipped into a scene of government depravity, the vague zone of punishment deemed by the provisions of the Eighth Amendment as “cruel and unusual.”

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Pike was then put in an ambulance, which would take her “alive or dead, to either a hospital or a morgue,” one news anchor reported. At a frenzied press conference, held around 9 P.M. C.D.T., a media witness who had seen many of Tennessee’s executions said, of this one, “None of it was normal.” Of course it wasn’t. Normalization of the death penalty—the refinement of the technical aspect, the legal aspect, the cultural aspect—has been a centuries-long project both within and outside the government. The Founding Fathers were uneasy about state killing, which cast a shadow over the country’s young democracy. They did not oppose capital punishment, but there was some ambivalence about it. Thomas Jefferson, revising Virginia’s laws after America broke from Britain, proposed reducing the number of capital crimes from thirty-nine to two: treason and murder. (The proposal failed by a single vote.) Early America saw the development of the prison, ironically, as a reform to lethal punishment. It was the next century, the lynching century, that gave capital punishment its terroristic character. And it was the century after that one, the global superpower century, in which the state loudly reclaimed killing from the zone of the extrajudicial, seeking to progress past the ghastly accessories of the rope and the tree, introducing instead a chemical cocktail and a needle, introducing protocol, making the whole thing look medicalized—humane.

Apparently, Mark Fowler, the physician who reportedly supervised the lethal injections administered to Pike, has been known to use the word “patient” in reference to the condemned. Tony Carruthers was a patient. In May, a team supervised by Fowler, also in Tennessee, tried and failed to insert an I.V. line into Carruthers’s body—his arms, his shoulders, his jugular, his chest—for more than an hour, until the execution was abandoned, with Carruthers subsequently granted a reprieve for one year.

A preponderance of failed lethal injections—the method accounts for the majority of botched executions since 1982—along with drug shortages, has led to the revival of older capital-punishment methods, such as the firing squad, and the introduction of new ones. Two years ago, the state of Alabama decided to start killing people on death row by asphyxiation, via nitrogen gas fed into the lungs until the masked person strapped to the gurney expires. Kenneth Eugene Smith, on death row in Alabama, had survived execution by lethal injection in 2022. In January of 2024, Smith became the first person in the country to die by nitrogen gas. His death constituted an experiment. To convey the brutality of the method, activists tend to bring up the counsel of the World Society for the Protection of Animals, which has advised that nitrogen hypoxia is not fit to put down any mammal. Eight men were killed via gassing until an Alabama district judge ruled the execution method unconstitutionally cruel, in June; the Supreme Court has maintained the block.

Smith is said to have thrashed and thrashed in the death chamber. A few weeks after his death, in early 2024, I found myself in Montgomery, trailing the civil-rights attorney and death-penalty abolitionist Bryan Stevenson. Stevenson, a kind of successor to Sister Helen Prejean, was lionized in the film “Just Mercy,” and is now recognized as a national hero. The importance of his work, the difficulty of it—the Hollywood reverence almost distorts it. Through his organization, the Equal Justice Initiative, he has acted as a check on the killing state, saving more than a hundred people on death row from execution. He has also transformed Montgomery, erecting a museum linking the slavery economy to our carceral society, a memorial to lynching victims, a sculpture park, and a civil-rights memorial. When I was reporting on Stevenson, I’d leave his office in the early evenings and then prop myself up at bars, playing up the curious-Northerner thing in my conversations with locals. I remember asking a barkeep what he thought of Stevenson and his work. He smiled. He thought Stevenson was to be admired. The justice system was not perfect; sometimes innocent men were put to death. But he thought that the death penalty itself materialized God’s will.

Potential innocence is the metric by which the flaw in the technology is measured. We live in an era of capital punishment that feigns modernization. For a brief period in the nineteen-seventies, there was, effectively, a national moratorium on the death penalty. The decision in a 1972 Supreme Court case, Furman v. Georgia—brought to the highest court after a Black man, William Henry Furman, a petty thief, was sentenced to death after accidentally shooting and killing William Micke, the owner of the home Furman was robbing—found that the penalty was “freakishly” applied. Executions were halted, and existing death sentences were cancelled. Then, four years later, in Gregg v. Georgia, the Court resurrected capital punishment, ruling that it was not, automatically, cruel and unusual. This brought a patina of the ethical to state killing: support for the death penalty surged, reaching eighty per cent by the nineties, driven by a national, bipartisan mania for tough-on-crime policy. Bill Clinton, in January of 1992, then the governor of Arkansas, famously left his Presidential campaign to attend the execution of Rickey Rector, a Black man with brain damage who had shot and killed a police officer and then turned the gun on himself. Four years later, Pike’s death sentence was handed down.

Today, twenty-seven states allow the death penalty, though most executions are concentrated in Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri, and Alabama. Support for capital punishment has, in the past twenty-five years, hovered at around half the population. According to a poll conducted by the Pew Research Center in August, sixty-six per cent of Americans support the death penalty in the case of murder, and yet fifty-nine per cent believe capital punishment “is not a crime deterrent.” The paradox is at the heart of the magical thinking undergirding our prison culture. A life cannot be restored through the offering of another. This is not math. And the math, in the case of Pike, is unstable, hinged somewhat arbitrarily on her birthday. Pike’s boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, was an accomplice in Colleen Slemmer’s killing, and was convicted of murder, too. But because Pike was eighteen at the time of the killing, she was sentenced to death, whereas Shipp, who was seventeen, received a life sentence. In the intervening years, most of which Pike has spent in solitary confinement, her legal team has petitioned the courts to consider the mitigating realities of Pike’s childhood, marked by sexual abuse and neglect—and the failure of the state to protect her.

Governor Bill Lee has halted all executions scheduled in Tennessee for this calendar year, and has commissioned an independent review of Pike’s attempted execution. The bug must be sorted out, to keep the state within the bounds of constitutionally acceptable cruelty. Pike is said to be in critical condition at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, although that information comes from the state, because her lawyers have not been granted access to her bedside. If Pike dies there, will the state argue that her death was legal and sanctioned, so as to appear a sane and methodical actor, and not an agent of revenge, or, in the words of Francis Bacon, the perpetrator of “a kind of wild justice”? ♦

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