Tennessee is scheduled to execute Christa Pike at 10 this morning. She would be the first woman the state has put to death in more than 200 years. She has refused a last meal.
What she did
In 1995, Pike was 18 and enrolled in the Job Corps program in Knoxville. She and two others led Colleen Slemmer, a 19-year-old classmate, into the woods. They beat her and slashed her. Someone carved a pentagram into her chest. Pike kept a fragment of her skull as a souvenir.
She was convicted of first-degree murder. She is now 50, and has spent more than three decades on death row, the only woman there.
Where the case stands
- Gov. Bill Lee denied clemency on Monday, saying he reached the decision after deliberate consideration.
- The execution is set for 10 a.m. Wednesday, by lethal injection.
- The Tennessee Department of Correction says Pike has refused a last meal.
Her lawyers have argued that she was sexually abused starting in early childhood, that she has untreated mental illness and brain damage, and that she was 18 at the time. They also argued that being restrained for lethal injection would cause her severe mental suffering given that history.
Pike wrote that she is at peace.
I am not afraid to die. I’m only nervous about the process.
Christa Pike
Colleen Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, plans to attend with a photograph of her daughter, and has said she will watch Pike get hooked up to a needle and go to sleep.
As of this writing the execution has not been carried out. We will update.
The age question
Worth explaining, because it is the legal heart of the case and it is one number wide.
The Supreme Court ruled in Roper v. Simmons in 2005 that executing someone for a crime committed under 18 is unconstitutional. Pike was 18.
Courts have repeatedly declined to extend that line upward, even as the neuroscience it rested on, that the parts of the brain governing impulse control and consequence keep developing into the mid-twenties, applies no differently to an 18-year-old than a 17-year-old. The cutoff is a legal convenience, not a biological one.
The BeezLoop Take
What Pike did to Colleen Slemmer is as bad as this gets. Any argument against this execution has to start there rather than around it, and the arguments that skip the pentagram and the skull fragment are not serious arguments.
And the case against executing her does not depend on minimizing any of it. She was eighteen years and some months old, with a documented history of sexual abuse beginning in toddlerhood and untreated mental illness, which is the biography of a person the state failed comprehensively before she ever hurt anyone. Tennessee did not intervene when she was eight. It is intervening now, at 10 a.m., with a needle. That sequence should bother people regardless of where they land on capital punishment.
The Roper line is the part that should bother even supporters of the death penalty. The Supreme Court accepted that an adolescent brain is not a fully formed one, then drew the boundary at a birthday because a court needs a rule. Pike crossed it by months. If the reasoning was sound, the line is arbitrary; if the line is right, the reasoning was never about brain development at all. Executing someone for what they did weeks past their eighteenth birthday is the place that contradiction becomes a person.
We would resist the framing that makes this about her being a woman, which is why most outlets are covering it. First in 200 years is a striking fact and it is not a moral one. Tennessee executing a woman is neither better nor worse than Tennessee executing a man, and the reason this case is being watched should be the age at offense and the abuse record, not the novelty.
The refused last meal is the detail that will stick, and it is worth not over-reading. It is not a statement anyone has explained. A person who says she is at peace and only nervous about the process declining to eat is, most likely, a person who is not hungry.
The question
If the Supreme Court accepts that an adolescent brain is not a finished one, what makes an eighteenth birthday the point where the state can kill you for what it did? And what does Tennessee owe a child it knew was being abused, thirty-five years later?
Related: a San Diego jury convicted a man of murder without a body.
Sources: NBC News · The Washington Post · WKRN · Tennessee Department of Correction
