(LifeSiteNews) — Debate over the morality and methodology of capital punishment reignited this week after the State of Tennessee botched two attempts at executing Christa Pike by lethal injection.
According to the state Department of Corrections, Pike was convicted in 1996 for the first-degree murder of co-worker Colleen Slemmer on the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture. Twenty-one years old at the time of her incarceration, Pike is the only woman on death row in Tennessee. In 2001, she was also convicted of attempting to murder fellow inmate Patricia Jones.
NBC News reports that Pike was slated to become the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years on Wednesday, the day after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected her final petition. But two attempts to administer the lethal drug failed, prompting her to be transferred to an “off-site medical facility” for treatment. Her exact condition is unknown.
Witnesses including Slemmer’s mother, Mary Martinez, later described a “mess,” with WKRN Nashville reporter Tori Gessner stating that “nothing about today was normal, typical at all.”
Gessner says that at 7:34 PM, eight minutes after the death chamber curtain first opened, Pike could be heard asking about her arm feeling “like it’s about to burst open.” Her attorneys say the second dose was administered around 8:00 PM, then the curtain closed again. Pike could be heard snoring.
The Department of Corrections responded in a statement that “every step of the State’s lawful, established execution protocol approved by the Attorney General’s Office” had been followed, and the “lethal injection chemical in the protocol has consistently been effective.” But Republican Gov. Bill Lee responded by ordering a “comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred.”
“They went to try to execute her, and she didn’t die,” said Martinez. “They didn’t say anything, and then, all of a sudden, they asked all the victims to leave. And we left … they <expletive> up.”
Pike’s attorneys are using the fiasco – which is the second failed execution in Tennessee this year – as grounds to try again to halt their client’s execution.
The case is expected to become a lightning rod for for those who oppose the death penalty entirely, as well as those who wish to reform how it is carried out. Capital punishment is one of the most contentious issues in modern politics, with ambivalence often crossing the usual partisan lines.
Proponents argue it a necessary deterrent, that it is a key tool in pushing violent offenders to plead guilty in order to evade it, and that nothing less than death can adequately register societal condemnation for humanity’s worst crimes. Opponents argue death is irreversible in cases of wrongful convictions, that its implementation often constitutes “cruel and unusual punishment,” and that society should draw a hard line against taking any life when not strictly necessary to defend one’s self or others from danger (a standard liberal opponents do not apply to their support of abortion-on-demand).
Pike “was convicted in 1996 of a 1995 murder committed when she was 18, barely out of a childhood in which she endured rape, sexual and physical violence, abuse, and neglect,” claims the left-wing Amnesty International. “The state failed to protect her as a child despite having knowledge of what she was facing. Her court-appointed lawyers then failed her at her trial, presenting little of the mitigating evidence of this abuse or its psychological consequences.”
Washington Examiner senior writer David Harsanyi reacted to the news by revisiting his 2024 piece, in response to a similar incident out of Idaho, suggesting that efforts to sanitize society’s methods of execution have actually had the opposite effect. “Firing squads are extraordinarily reliable. Also, punctual,” he wrote. “There’s an inherent dignity not only in falling to a hail of bullets but in aiming and firing them. Surely it is less barbaric than being strapped down to a gurney in some antiseptic medical procedure.”
“Execution is not a medical procedure,” Examiner reporter Byron York agreed. “It should not be something that could only be competently performed by a doctor. It’s an *execution.* A firing squad is entirely appropriate.”
In 2018, the late Pope Francis complicated the discourse about the religious permissibility of capital punishment when he issued a papal decree revising n. 2267 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church to declare that a “new understanding has emerged of the significance of penal sanctions imposed by the state,” and therefore “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.” It also declared that the Church “works with determination for its abolition worldwide.”
The passage previously read that authorities should limit themselves to “non-lethal means … to defend and protect people’s safety from the aggressor” and “cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity ‘are very rare, if not practically nonexistent,’” but granted that “traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty” when absolutely necessary.