This State Hasn’t Executed a Woman in 200 Years. It Is Picking the Worst Possible Way to Go Back.

Jurisprudence Christa Pike. Brianna Paciorka/News Sentinel/USA Today Network via Reuters Connect Sign up for Executive Dysfunction, a weekly newsletter that highlights one under-the-radar story about how Trump is changing the law—or how the law is pushing back—and keeps you posted on the latest from Slate’s Jurisprudence team. The United States rarely executes women, no matter how gruesome their crimes. In fact, only 18 women have been put to death in this country in the past 50 years. That translates to around 1 percent of the executions carried out in that period. The last one occurred on Jan. 3, 2023, when Missouri killed Amber McLaughlin. On Sept. 30, Tennessee plans to add a new name to the list of women put to death: Christa Pike, who was 18 years old when she tortured and murdered 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in 1996, making Pike the youngest woman sentenced to die under the modern death penalty. On Friday, W. Mark Ward, a judge appointed by the Tennessee Supreme Court to review her case, gave the go-ahead for Pike’s execution, ruling that the state’s execution process would not violate her constitutional rights. His decision downplays the suffering she will endure when the state puts her to death. Pike, who the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty describes as having been the victim of “child sexual abuse, multiple rapes, and parental abandonment and neglect,” would be the first woman executed in the Volunteer State since 1819. If her history of abuse and neglect were not enough to raise questions about the appropriateness of her death sentence, there is also the fact that neither of her two co-defendants received a similar punishment. One of them was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole, and the other was paroled after cooperating with investigators. All of this highlights the injustices that mark Pike’s case and the fact that her execution would be a spectacle of cruelty. That’s without even getting to the method of execution. Even the most ardent death-penalty supporters should recognize that this horrific execution should not go forward. If the courts don’t stop Pike’s execution, the public should urge Gov. Bill Lee to spare her life. In June, following the botched execution of Tennessee death row inmate Tony Carruthers, Pike’s lawyers asked the Tennessee Supreme Court to find that it would be unconstitutional to execute her following the same protocol used in Carruthers’ case. As they told the court: Tennessee’s new lethal injection protocol, calling for a single drug (pentobarbital), is plagued with the same issues that have marked botched executions for decades: secrecy, intentional omission, inattention to detail, and untrained and unlicensed prison personnel attempting to fill a medical role. They called the court’s attention to Pike’s “individual physical characteristics that include, but are not limited to, Thrombocytopenia/Thrombocytosis, Bipolar disorder, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, hyperlipidemia, and small veins that make insertion of a needle difficult.” And they added that “the Plaintiff’s Bipolar disorder and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder make it sure or very likely that her isolation” for 14 days prior to her execution “will result in unnecessary and superadded pain and suffering, terror, and disgrace.” In Pike’s case, Ward held several days of hearings and listened to a number of experts. Those hearings were “the first to proceed under a recently amended Tennessee Supreme Court rule allowing review of the method or timing of a scheduled execution.” Despite considerable evidence to the contrary, Ward concluded that the state was not obligated to offer a different method of execution. Among other things, he concluded that “achieving peripheral IV access pursuant to the current lethal injection protocol” would not “make it ‘sure or very likely’ that the challenged protocol will ‘cause [Ms. Pike] serious illness and needless suffering’ ” and that requiring her to be “observed by male prison officials for two weeks prior to the execution” would not do so either. Ward also found that Pike had not identified another method of execution, as is required by U.S. Supreme Court precedent, that would be better than putting her to death under Tennessee’s current protocol. Coincidentally, last March, Ward gave the green light for Carruthers’ execution after his attorneys had argued that Carruthers was not competent to be executed because he was “consumed by psychotic delusions.” The process in Pike’s case now moves back to the state supreme court, which has set Aug. 28 as the deadline to file objections to the special master’s report. And there is plenty to object to. At every turn, Ward credited the state’s expert testimony and discounted the testimony of defense witnesses and experts. He did so on various grounds, including the fact that they had not examined Pike before rendering an opinion about whether her veins were too small to handle the required IV placement. And on each of Pike’s claims, Ward offered the same summary conclusion that she had not met her burden of proof. But as her lawyers rightly noted after the judge issued his findings of fact and conclusions of law, “The Special Master found that Christa Pike suffers from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Bipolar Disorder as a result of the repeated rapes and childhood sexual abuse she experienced at the hands of multiple men.” And they called attention to the fact that no one “disputed the testimony from Christa’s licensed clinical psychologist Dr. Bethany Brand that Christa would relive her past traumas … [by] the extraction team physically extracting Christa from her cell, holding her down, and strapping her onto the execution gurney just before they attempt to insert IV lines.” That procedure, they argued, would result in “Christa involuntarily reliving the worst moments of her life, much like traumatized soldiers when they return from a war zone.” To make matters worse, the physician who participated in the Carruthers’ execution “publicly declared that he would establish the central line requested due to the compromised condition of Christa’s veins.” Pike’s lawyers claim that “he is not competent to perform this procedure,” noting that “the only time in the past 13 years he has attempted to place a central line, on Mr. Carruthers, he failed.” Almost a century ago, America witnessed another woman put to death in a spectacle of cruelty when Arizona botched the hanging of Eva Dugan after state officials miscalculated the length of the drop needed to kill her. Dugan was decapitated. What awaits Christa Pike without last-minute relief from the courts or the governor will be less dramatic, but it will be no less cruel. Death Penalty Jurisprudence Sexual Assault Tennessee