Decades later, what May Martinez wanted to say about her daughter, Colleen Slemmer, is that she loved children. Slemmer worked at Martinez’s daycare; she babysat; she volunteered with the Special Olympics, helping kids with special needs. Slemmer was “sweet, quiet and mild-mannered,” with an “innate impulse to help anyone in need,” friends, loved ones, and teachers told the local news. She was also independent—a trait that perhaps led her, at 19, to pursue a career in the then-unusual field of computers by signing up for the federal Job Corps program in Knoxville.
It was there that Colleen Slemmer caught the attention of Christa Pike. Pike told her friend Kim Ilolio that she was going to kill Slemmer because she “just felt mean that day.” The next night Pike, her boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp, and fellow student Shadolla Peterson took Slemmer into the woods. There, the group, led by Pike, beat Slemmer; cut her back with a meat cleaver and carved a pentagram into her chest; slashed her throat with a box cutter six times; and finally bashed her head in with a large piece of asphalt, killing her. Slemmer tried to run away, but her killers restrained her. Finally, she begged for her life as they killed her.
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As Pike relayed the story, Ilolio reported, she was “dancing in a circle, smiling, and singing ‘la, la, la.’” The next morning at breakfast, Pike mentioned she’d kept a piece of Slemmer’s skull as a souvenir, adding that “yes, I’m eating breakfast with it.” She also confessed to another student, Stephanie Wilson, showing her the skull fragment and the blood on her shoes. And she eventually confessed to police, showing them exactly what she had done.
A jury of her peers found Pike guilty of Slemmer’s murder, then sentenced her to death based on the finding that the murder was “heinous, atrocious, or cruel in that it involved torture or serious physical abuse beyond that necessary to produce death.” As a later appellate court ruling concluded, Pike showed a “stunning lack of remorse” for the crime. As she wrote to Shipp in a letter after her sentencing, “Ya see what I get for trying to be nice to the hoe? I went ahead and bashed her brains out so she’d die quickly instead of letting her bleed to death and suffer more, and they fuekin FRY me!!! Ain’t that some shit?” Her depravity is further evidenced by Pike’s attempt, in 2001, to murder fellow inmate Patricia Jones, a crime for which she received an additional 25-year sentence.
Last week, more than three decades after she murdered Colleen Slemmer, the state of Tennessee failed to put Christa Pike to death. Her lawyers allege that the execution team did not properly place the IV meant to administer a lethal dose of pentobarbital. Pike is, as of this writing, reportedly unconscious and on a ventilator. The state’s corrections commissioner maintains that Tennessee’s execution protocol was followed, but he has nonetheless resigned.
For some, Tennessee’s failure to execute Pike has become proof of the problems with lethal injection. That’s a not-unreasonable position. Lethal injection has the highest rate of failure among commonly used execution methods. Our preference for it over more effective means—firing squad, electrocution, nitrogen hypoxia—is the result of a combination of cultural squeamishness and “methods” litigation by the anti-death-penalty lobby that has dramatically reduced what tools states can use to carry out death sentences.
But for many others, the failure of Pike’s execution goes beyond implementation issues and demonstrates the “obscenity,” the “absurdity,” of capital punishment. In this view, the fact that Pike’s attempted execution was ugly and unpleasant is sufficient basis to abolish the death penalty altogether.
Yet no law stipulates that executions must be pleasant. The Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishment” does not, the Supreme Court has written, preclude capital punishment (a method of punishment explicitly contemplated by the Fifth Amendment). Nor does it oblige the states to make executions gentle. The typical method of execution at the Founding was hanging, hardly an enjoyable way to go. Rather, the Eighth Amendment prohibits the “superaddition” of “terror, pain, or disgrace.” It is a prohibition on excess, not on pain necessary to the act.
By contrast, federal laws and laws in 27 states authorize capital punishment for murders that are particularly heinous. Such laws are, as recent Manhattan Institute polling showed, overwhelmingly popular. Two-thirds of Americans favor the death penalty for murders, like Slemmer’s, “involving torture, sexual violence, or other extreme cruelty.” Certain acts—gruesome murders, terrorism or sedition, the rape of a child—call out for the highest possible penalty available to a free people.
It is reasonable, therefore, to be outraged that Tennessee failed to execute Christa Pike—but only insofar as it means that justice was denied, once again, for her crime.
It has taken Tennessee over 30 years to carry out the sentence that a jury of Pike’s peers found appropriate. This is not entirely, or even largely, the state’s fault. Like every other capital inmate in America, Pike has had the benefit of a richly endowed capital-defense bar making every possible argument with the express purpose of delaying her death. But with her appeals exhausted, it was Tennessee’s obligation to carry out the sentence.
Its failure to do so fails the people of Tennessee, May Martinez and, most importantly, Colleen Slemmer. It was her young life, after all, that was slaughtered, for no other reason than the joy Pike derived from doing so. Colleen Slemmer died scared and pleading. Colleen Slemmer will never have a job, never see her mother again, never have children of her own.
The fact that Tennessee couldn’t put Slemmer’s killer to death does not obviate its duty to do so. That’s what Christa Pike’s execution is about: not a referendum on the merits of the death penalty but the obligation to see justice done.