Tennessee tried twice to execute Christa Pike and failed both times — and the anti-death penalty crowd wants you to blame the punishment, not the procedure. Ordinary Americans should see through that. The state's failure to carry out a lawful sentence doesn't invalidate the sentence. It invalidates the syringe.
Pike has been on Death Row since 1996, when Tennessee convicted her of first-degree murder for killing 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. According to Tennessee's U.S. Supreme Court appeal, Pike lured Slemmer into the woods, slashed her throat with a box cutter, slammed a meat cleaver into her back, crushed her head with a chunk of asphalt, and kept a piece of her skull as a souvenir. Pike told a friend she "just felt mean that day." State officials say Pike "danced, smiled, and sang while she recounted these details."
The weeping class has spent weeks wringing hands over Pike's botched execution. The Guardian called it "the essence of cruelty." Protesters outside the Tennessee Capitol declared that "executions are legalized lynching." Notice whose name they never whisper: Colleen Slemmer.
Here is the actual cruelty. Slemmer's mother, May Martinez, sat in a witness room connected to the death chamber on September 30th, expecting to see justice done. Instead, she watched a gurney spectacle. According to journalists present, Pike asked if her arm was supposed to hurt as much as it did, raised her head, and kicked her legs. A curtain closed, opened, closed again. The microphone stayed on, broadcasting labored breathing. After an hour and a half, witnesses were sent home with Pike still alive. Steven Hale of the Nashville Banner told reporters afterward, "I cannot emphasize enough how much of whatever just happened happened behind a closed curtain." Pike's lawyers had warned in court filings that she had blood and circulatory conditions putting her at risk for exactly this outcome. The execution team pumped in the pentobarbital anyway.
The Associated Press reports that I.V. problems have derailed more than a half-dozen executions since 2009, including one in Tennessee just this past May. Lethal injection is a failed experiment. It perverts medicine — alcohol swabs before poison, stethoscopes to confirm death — to sanitize an act that should be unmistakable. Death penalty opponents have used drug shortages as a stealth filibuster, choking off executions without winning a legislative vote. That's not democracy. That's bureaucratic nullification.
The case for capital punishment isn't vengeance. It's justice. When the state refuses to execute evildoers, it abandons its most fundamental duty: protect the innocent, punish the wicked. Some criminals are so vile they forfeit their right to walk the earth. Pike is one of them.
But the method matters. As Deroy Murdock argued in The Gateway Pundit, restore the alternatives that work: the gas chamber, the gallows, the firing squad, the electric chair. Better yet, offer Execution Choice — let the condemned pick their method. If Pike preferred the needle, give her the needle. But stop letting pharmaceutical logistics and performative hygiene hold justice hostage.
Governor Bill Lee has ordered an investigation. The only question worth answering is why Tennessee keeps reaching for a syringe when a rope would do.
