Christa Pike is fifty years old. She is alive. She lies in a hospital in Nashville on a ventilator, critically ill, because Tennessee gave her two doses of pentobarbital on 30 September and she did not die. The state followed every step of the state’s lawful execution protocol. That is the indictment.
The execution at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville on 30 September was halted after those two doses failed to kill her. Pike’s attorneys allege that intravenous lines were placed improperly and that the drug entered tissue rather than her bloodstream, leaving both arms severely injured. Stephen Ferrell, an assistant federal defender, told CNN’s State of the Union that the prognosis is unknown and may not be known for days. Five days later she was still in the hospital, critically ill. She remains in critical condition. The state walked away from an execution it could not finish and left a woman fighting for her life in an intensive care unit. Pike’s lawyer has called the night cruel and torturous. Her attorneys are demanding commutation.
The Tennessee Department of Correction says it followed the state’s lawful execution protocol to the letter, and that the protocol permitted no further steps once those steps were complete. Both accounts can be true. Both can be read together, because together they are the whole of the state’s defense.
James Crowson represented Pike during a stage of her post-conviction appeals for the Tennessee Post-Conviction Defender and visited her on death row dozens of times. He last spoke with her in 2009. He says he is not surprised. Defense filings had warned for years that Pike’s compromised veins made the procedure dangerous, warnings he said put her “at risk for exactly what happened.” Crowson identified the rot in one sentence. States inclined to impose the death penalty do not really include medicine or science in the room when they write these protocols.
The record beneath is older. Pike was 18 in 1995 when she took part in the torture and killing of Colleen Slemmer, a 19-year-old fellow student at the Knoxville Job Corps. Tadaryl Shipp, her co-defendant and then-boyfriend, was 17. Months younger, same conduct, ineligible for the death penalty, and serving a sentence of life imprisonment. Pike has spent 32 years fighting for her life over an age difference of a few months. Her post-conviction appeal was built on ineffective assistance of counsel, that her original attorneys failed to put her bipolar disorder, her post-traumatic stress disorder, her brain damage and her history of severe childhood abuse in front of the sentencing jury. Two serious psychiatric diagnoses were offered and never weighed. In a clemency petition she wrote that it took her years to grasp what she had done, that she took the life of someone’s child, someone’s sister, someone’s friend, and that the thought sickens her.
The institutional response has been damage control, not accountability. Governor Bill Lee announced that Department of Correction commissioner Frank Strada will resign in October, the predictable fallout, as Crowson puts it, of a disaster under national scrutiny. Lee ordered an independent review. He halted executions in Tennessee for the rest of the year. But according to death penalty lawyers, Pike’s was at least the fifth botched execution Strada has presided over since 2022, spanning Tennessee and Arizona, where he previously worked. Five.
Tennessee was given a lawful task. It could not perform it. A protocol authored without clinicians is a checklist, not a medical procedure. When the checklist runs out while the prisoner is still alive, the state has no answer except that it finished the checklist. Compliance with a document written without doctors is not a standard of care. It is the absence of one. Frank, the warnings were on file. The map of the state’s own failure had been drawn in a court the state pays for and filed where the state could read it. The state read it, and it drove off the edge of it anyway, and then it pointed to its own paperwork as the defense. This was not an unforeseeable accident. It was a predicted outcome that the state proceeded to produce.
I see what Tennessee did here. I will not look away from it. The distance between a life sentence and a death sentence in this case is not moral reasoning. It is a birthday. Crowson called 18 what it plainly is: an arbitrary number. Frank, the arbitrariness the state will defend is not the birthday. It is the binder. Tennessee names Colleen Slemmer when it justifies the sentence. It names a protocol when it fails to carry it out. The first name is a girl who was nineteen. The second name is a document. You will answer for the second.
Her name is Colleen Slemmer. She was nineteen. She was tortured and killed in 1995, and nothing that happens to Christa Pike in a Nashville hospital brings her back, and nothing that happened to Christa Pike on that table takes her away. A biography of suffering does not erase the biography of the woman whose life was taken. Bill, nothing in this column forgives Pike. Nothing in it excuses you. The state reads Pike’s crime and Pike’s body as one subject, and it cannot be both. The one is a verdict. The other is a woman in an intensive care unit who was told her veins were no good and was put on the table anyway.
Frank, there is a taste at the back of your mouth tonight, copper and old, and no amount of water in the morning is going to rinse it out. It has been there since the first failure and it has only thickened. You have carried it through Arizona and into Tennessee and it will follow you out of the office in October, and it will not be on the resignation letter, and it will not be in the review. Your hands are cold tonight. The hand that presided over five is the same hand that will sign the resignation. It has not been washed. The not-washing is the indictment.
Bill, you will read the review in a warm room with your name printed on the cover. The prose will be careful. Somewhere between the first page and the last your chest will go tight and you will set the binder down on the table and you will not be able to say why. Your body is not confused. It knows exactly why. It is the woman on the ventilator, and she has been in the room with you the whole time you have been reading. You halted executions for the rest of the year. You ordered an independent review. That is the entire list. It is a short list for a fifth failure.
Frank, you are a functionary. That is what you are, and the resignation in October does not change it. The state needed a man who would carry out the steps on a woman whose compromised veins were already documented in a defense filing, and it found yours. It has found yours five times since 2022, in two states, through every warning that was ever filed in writing, and each time the paperwork was reported complete while the damage went into the body on the table. You are not the danger the word promises. You are the instrument. The danger is the room that knows the instrument will do exactly this and keeps calling for it, and you keep answering, and you keep signing. That is what you are. You will sleep in a warm room tonight with the copper still in your mouth.
Bill, you are the man who was told. The warnings reached you. The filings reached you. The compromised veins were described in a court the state pays for, and you read them, and you kept the signature. You are the man who reads the warning, signs anyway, and then offers the review as the answer to his own signature. That is what you are. Both of you sleep in warm rooms tonight. Neither of you will sleep clean.
Crowson remembered Pike as superficially charming and attentive, a person, he said, unrecognizable from the teenager who committed the crime. He also said the nation has a strange relationship with mental illness, that it is too often discounted and mocked. He is right. Frank, the record shows what discounting looks like from the inside. Two diagnoses offered at sentencing and never weighed. A woman’s veins mapped in a defense filing and never read.
This is an argument against the men who were supposed to carry it out and could not. It is not a defense of a killing that already happened. It is an indictment of a state that tried to kill a woman, failed, and called the difference complete. The protocol was followed. The medicine was absent. The woman on the table absorbed both failures. A system that can produce five of these and answer with paperwork has told you everything about what it thinks the ultimate penalty is for. It is not for Colleen Slemmer. It is not for Christa Pike. It is for the binder. Tennessee can finish the review and it can finish the resignation and it can finish the year without another execution. What it cannot do is stand in front of a ventilator and call the paperwork care.
“Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.” — Matthew 25:45
The woman on the ventilator is one of the least of these. Tennessee did not do it. The protocol did not do it. The review will not do it. The resignation will not do it. Colleen Slemmer is nineteen years old forever. She is not coming back. And the state that invokes her name has not finished what it says it owes her. It has only finished the paperwork.