Tennessee should not be allowed to execute Christa Pike

In the last 50 years, the U.S. has put more than 1,600 people to death, but only about 1 percent of those executed have been women. That’s not because of lingering cultural stereotypes, but because, as law professor Elizabeth Rappaport has explained, women “rarely commit the specific predatory murders that lead to death sentences.”

There is little doubt that Christa Pike, the only woman on Tennessee’s death row, committed such a murder. At age 18, along with two others, Pike tortured and killed Colleen Slemmer in 1995. She later bragged to others “that she had cut the teenager’s throat six times with a box cutter, cut her back with a meat cleaver, and carved a pentagram into her chest. The three killers continued even as Slemmer ‘begged’ them to stop.” 

Pike, due to be executed later this year, is suing to prevent the Volunteer State from executing her, and not because she is a woman. Pike alleges that Tennessee’s execution protocol, “calling for single drug (pentobarbital), is plagued with the same issues that have marked botched executions for decades.” 

Moreover, she aggressively attacks the Supreme Court’s made-up requirement that someone challenging a method of execution should have to identify an available alternative method by which they can be executed. Her lawyers argue that requiring her to do so violates her religious beliefs. Pike is a practicing Buddhist, and the “requirement that she pleaded an alternative method violates her sincerely held religious beliefs against participating in any process leading to her own death.”

The Tennessee court should grant her relief, because forcing her to choose a method by which she can be executed would, as she alleges in her lawsuit, constitute “a substantial burden on her sincerely held religious beliefs does not further a compelling governmental interest, and it is not the least restrictive means for the government to accomplish its stated interest.” 

Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti disagrees. In his view, “Pike has offered nothing but speculation that the well-established, constitutional lethal injection method poses any unique risk in her case.” In addition, the state argues that Pike’s failure to specify an alternative method means she cannot qualify for relief, and that religious beliefs do not exempt an inmate from Supreme Court precedent.

Skrmetti cites the court’s 2015 Glossip v. Gross decision, in which the justices ruled that the “Eighth Amendment requires a prisoner to plead and prove a known and available alternative.”

Professor Alexandra Klein is one among many legal scholars to point out that, under Glossip, “A challenger could succeed in showing that the state’s method of execution presented a risk of severe pain, but failing to satisfy the available method portion of the test means that their case would fail even if the state’s chosen method would cause serious pain and suffering.”  

Tennessee’s response to Pike’s religious freedom arguments also seems hypocritical and disingenuous, since the state has been aggressive in recognizing such arguments in other contexts.  

Beyond Pike’s claims about her religious beliefs, she lays out a compelling case that “She is unable to constitutionally allege an alternative method or manner of execution because she is insufficiently competent to be able to knowingly and willfully instruct the defendants how to kill her.” Following Glossip, this problem has become endemic in challenges to the constitutionality of any method of execution. 

At least in theory, states invest a lot in trying to figure out what method of execution they will use in putting someone to death. They invite “experts” to advise them and make carefully considered choices. 

After Glossip, the responsibility for knowing how methods of execution work has shifted to death row inmates and their lawyers. “Statutes or precedent,” Klein says, “that permit a choice among methods of execution produce an illusion of autonomy, but ultimately serve state interests and strengthen the institution of capital punishment.” 

And if that were not enough to raise serious questions about Tennessee’s plan to execute Pike, her lawsuit points out that pentobarbital executions have a poor track record, and that her “severe medical conditions … make it sure or very likely that her execution will result in unnecessary and super-added pain and suffering, terror, and disgrace.”  

Among those conditions are bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. Pike also suffers from a blood condition that will cause her to suffer “even more extreme pulmonary edema than the typical prisoner.”

It should also be noted that Pike has taken responsibility for her role in the crime while incarcerated and, in her own words, has “changed drastically” since committing the murder. 

These things all make Pike’s case noteworthy. But it is the facts of the case, not her gender, that would make her execution cruel and unconstitutional.  

Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College.

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