Christa Pike has spent the past 30 years in prison, and she deserves to spend the rest of her life there. Everyone agrees on that.
The debate is over how long the rest of her life should be.
Gov. Bill Lee (R-TN) and Tennessee’s court system believe Pike should be executed. They tried to execute her on Wednesday but failed. Pike is still alive and recovering in the hospital as of this writing.
Lee has suspended all executions for the rest of 2026. Pike’s was the second failed lethal injection in the state this year.
Because Pike is a woman, because her crime was so grisly and demented, because the execution has been postponed for so long, because she was so obviously harmed by repeated sexual abuse as a child, and now because of the failed execution, her case has reignited the debate over the death penalty.
Should the death penalty exist in America today? If so, should it apply to Pike?
These questions aren’t as simple as many seem to think.
The crime
Pike, at age 18, murdered a 19-year-old classmate at a job-training program. The murder was premeditated and gruesome. And before she murdered Colleen Slemmer by smashing her skull with a large chunk of asphalt, Pike and her friends tortured her.
After the murder, Pike kept a piece of Slemmer’s skull as a memento of her crime.
It’s been reported that Pike thought Slemmer was trying to steal her boyfriend, who was also involved in the killing and is still in prison.
This much is not in dispute: Pike murdered Slemmer in cold blood after torturing her. She doesn’t claim innocence. She doesn’t claim any exculpatory motive such as self-defense. Pike is a murderer who deserves life in prison.
In 1996, a state court sentenced Pike to death, and she was first scheduled to be executed in 2002. Decades of legal wrangling ended last month, when she exhausted her appeals and was scheduled to die on Wednesday.
Her most recent appeal argued that her initial defense, 30 years ago, was incompetent. Pike was raped by a neighbor at age 12 and then sexually abused by her mother’s live-in boyfriend. She spent time in a home for troubled youth, and even there, she stood out as troubled.
She now describes herself as a mentally ill 18-year-old at the time she committed the attack — not to deny her guilt, but in arguing against the death penalty.
What is the purpose of the death penalty?
Should Tennessee kill Pike?
A prior question: Should states be in the business of executing criminals at all? Prior to that is the question of what purpose punishment serves.
This photo provided by the Tennessee Department of Correction shows Christa Pike on Jan. 12, 2023. (TDOC via AP)
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This photo provided by the Tennessee Department of Correction shows Christa Pike on Jan. 12, 2023. (TDOC via AP)
The primary reason to punish a criminal is to incapacitate a dangerous person. Executing a killer prevents her from killing again. Locking up a thief prevents him from stealing again. The public is safer when criminals are not walking the streets.
In the past, executing a criminal was at times necessary to keep him off the streets, because it was hard to keep someone securely locked up. Today, prison escapes happen but are extremely rare, and escapees are almost always caught very quickly.
If you can effectively keep a criminal locked up, another reason to execute her is if she continues to be a threat in prison. Sure enough, Pike was convicted in 2001 of attempted murder while behind bars. But the victim, Patricia Jones, later testified that Pike had intervened to stop Jones from killing another inmate.
These days, death penalty advocates warn that prison cannot keep violent criminals contained because ideological, left-wing prosecutors, governors, or judges are apt to spring the criminals free through misguided ideas of mercy.
A second reason we punish criminals is to deter them. While it’s reasonable to assume the death penalty might be a stronger deterrent than life in prison, decades of research seem to refute this assumption. The severity of a punishment doesn’t deter crime. What deters crime is the likelihood of getting caught and punished at all.
A third argument for punishment is more abstract: Justice is giving a person what they deserve. It is retribution.
Nigel Biggar, an Anglican theologian, put it this way: “I do not think of retribution as necessarily or properly vengeful. I think of it merely as a hostile response to wrongdoing, which might be and should be proportionate.”
Arguably, the proportionate retribution for killing is being killed.
The late Father James Schall, a professor at Georgetown University, put it this way: “The man who puts evil things in the world can best let the world know that he has changed, that he accepts proper order, by himself undergoing a suitable punishment. This penance is not just vengeance. It is what is due. It restores the order of things in the best way open to us.”
Schall’s warning against vengeance points toward a danger of the death penalty — it could make us worse. But this isn’t the only argument against the death penalty.
Arguments against the death penalty
We do not tend to think the federal government or state governments are the most capable entities in the world. Conservatives, in particular, would not want the government to run our hospitals or our health insurance, because we believe they would be incompetent.
If you support the death penalty, though, you are trusting the government to mete out death — a task in which it must be flawless, because it cannot be undone. On that point, Tennessee’s recent botched executions demonstrate its lack of perfect competence on this matter.
Also, the United States of America in 2026 is very effective at imprisoning people.
In Tennessee, for instance, three violent criminals have escaped state prisons in the past 20 years, a review of media accounts suggests. All three of them were caught and returned to prison within a week. None have re-escaped.
Pike was involved in a failed escape plan: A pen pal on the outside bribed a prison guard in a plot to set her free. Pike was never charged in the plot, which failed, and the two conspirators were punished.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that the death penalty is never acceptable, because every human being, made in the image, has dignity and infinite worth, regardless of his or her actions.
This is not a popular view these days. As a culture, we tend to judge people by their actions, especially their worst actions. We conclude that not only does a murderer forfeit her freedom, she forfeits her dignity.
In other words, our culture brands as subhuman those who do bad things.
Consider how many people openly cheered the assassinations of conservative activist Charlie Kirk or United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Consider the increase in political violence, such as multiple assassination attempts on President Donald Trump, and polls suggesting 1 in 3 Democrats would be happy if Trump were killed.
Our culture has replaced the idea of just retribution with a thirst for vengeance. The Pike case has highlighted this bloodthirst. Social media is flooded with posters, largely conservatives, suggesting Tennessee execute Pike the same gruesome way Pike killed Slemmer: smashing her head with a rock.
Before the botched execution, people were publicly relishing the prospect of the execution, as if this were a happy event.
MALL CRIMINALS: WITHOUT LAW AND ORDER, WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS
The death penalty, it seems, makes us more pro-death and makes us lose sight of the value of human life and the inherent dignity of each person.
Just retribution makes a criminal better off. Killing a criminal doesn’t make her better — and it seems to make us worse.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
