When she was 18, Christa Pike taunted and beat 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, eventually slashing her throat and body with a box cutter. Pike and an accomplice carved pentagrams into Slemmer’s body and when she still didn’t die, Pike picked up a large piece of asphalt and bashed Slemmer in the head with it repeatedly causing a fatal fracture. Pike then took a piece of Slemmer’s skull as a trophy—showing it to other people and bragging about the crime—until she was arrested, when the skull fragment was recovered by police in Pike’s jacket pocket and held onto by the state as evidence.

Bafflingly, though they could have taken photos and made a mold as Slemmer’s mother said years ago so the piece of skull could be buried with the rest of her daughter’s body, Tennessee officials have refused to give it to Slemmer’s mother until after Pike is executed on September 30. Their position: “a pound of flesh” for a piece of skull.

Recoiling from the savage details of Pike’s crime is a normal, human response. Wanting Pike to stay in jail for the rest of her life is also a normal, human reaction. What’s abnormal and inhuman is Tennessee’s insistence on exacting “a pound of flesh” from Pike—by executing her via lethal injection—for killing Slemmer.

The phrase a “pound of flesh” comes from Shakespeare. In his play, “The Merchant of Venice,” a moneylender demands a literal pound of flesh from a merchant for not repaying a loan. Grammarist.com tells us nowadays, “The expression a pound of flesh describes a ruthless or unreasonable demand often made at great personal........

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