Governor Bill Lee has denied Christa Pike’s clemency petition and left Tennessee’s scheduled lethal injection in place. The case carries its own weight. In 1995, Pike and her seventeen-year-old boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp beat and tortured nineteen-year-old Colleen Slemmer at a Knoxville job-training camp for troubled teens. Pike had accused Slemmer of insulting her and trying to steal her boyfriend. Two other residents testified that Pike bragged of the killing before and after, and showed them a piece of Slemmer’s skull. A pentagram was carved into the dead girl’s chest. The jury convicted Pike of first-degree murder and imposed death; Shipp, one year younger, received life with parole. Governor Lee acted after what he called deliberate consideration and a thorough review. Clemency, properly construed, is not a second trial and not a sentimental revision of every sentence after the condemned acquires years, treatment, remorse, or useful conduct. Romans 13 gives the governing authority the sword. The magistrate does not surrender it when the condemned’s later life becomes more legible. Tennessee scheduled the execution months ago; the sentence entered at trial still stands, and Pike has exhausted her appeals.
On September 30, Tennessee will strap Christa Pike to a gurney and fix leather restraints across her wrists, ankles, chest, and forehead. A medical team will insert intravenous lines into both arms. The execution protocol administers three drugs in sequence. First: midazolam, a benzodiazepine, delivered at a dosage intended to render Pike unconscious and suppress respiration. Under the drug’s concentration, the cerebral cortex quiets within minutes. Pike’s eyelids close. The muscles of respiration — the diaphragm, the intercostals — slow, then stop. The chest wall rises once, twice, and then holds. Oxygen deprivation begins at the cellular level. The lips and fingertips deepen in color as hemoglobin sheds its load. The staff watches for the absence of purposeful movement and checks for corneal reflex: a strip of paper touched to the surface of the eye produces no blink. Pike does not respond. She is unconscious or dead; the line between the two is pharmacological, not physiological, and the staff proceeds.
The second drug is a neuromuscular blocking agent. Vecuronium bromide or its equivalent, delivered through the same IV, binds to acetylcholine receptors at the neuromuscular junction and paralyzes every skeletal muscle in the body. The diaphragm, already suppressed by the midazolam, is now immobilized completely. If the first drug was insufficient — if Pike retains any flicker of awareness beneath the sedation — she cannot move, cannot speak, cannot open her eyes, cannot draw breath, cannot cry out. The body lies still on the gurney. The staff checks for movement. There is none. The monitor shows no respiratory wave.
The third drug is potassium chloride, a concentrated salt solution that disrupts the electrical conduction of the myocardium. Delivered intravenously, it raises serum potassium to a level that depolarizes the cardiac cell membrane and collapses the sodium-potassium gradient on which every heartbeat depends. The sinus rhythm, if it persists, fractures into a widened, disorganized pattern. The ventricles fibrillate — an uncoordinated quiver that moves no blood — and then cease. The cardiac monitor, which has traced the electrical activity of Pike’s heart in real time, displays the change: the regular complexes narrow, irregularize, flatten into a line. The flat line sustains. The staff watches. The witnesses in the adjacent room read the minutes. A physician enters, places a stethoscope against Pike’s chest, confirms the absence of heart sounds, and notes the time of death.
Tennessee has maintained the sentence attached to Pike’s body for nearly three decades — through appeals, petitions, reviews, and clemency proceedings. If this execution is completed, Pike will become the first woman the State has put to death in more than two hundred years. Eighteen women have been executed in the United States since the 1970s, compared with 1,663 men. The dying body on the gurney is the sentence made manifest: the standing the sovereign entered against her name, rendered in flesh.
Pike stands outside the covenant by the standing the State entered against her name. The magistrate marked her as condemned, and the mark governs the person the State continues to hold. The years, the treatment, the age, the record of changed conduct, the remorse her attorneys describe — these occupy the lower station beneath the original sentence. They may be recorded. They do not alter the rank.
At seventeen, Shipp received life with parole. At eighteen, Pike received death. One year supplies the boundary the sovereign has drawn. Romans 13 supplies the authority; sovereignty supplies the jurisdiction; the sentence supplies the standing. Tennessee has read the woman she became through the verdict rendered against the girl she was, and Providence has disclosed the place assigned to her. The condemned are not restored by becoming different people. Colleen Slemmer’s mother asks that her daughter finally rest. The Wall has answered.