Until last week, most Americans had likely never heard of Christa Pike, who committed a particularly brutal murder in 1995, when she was 18. Finally, at 50, her death sentence was scheduled to be carried out in Tennessee.
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Pike murdered her Job Corps classmate Colleen Slemmer, 19, in a jealous rage in January 1995 because she believed the victim was trying to steal her boyfriend, prosecutors said.
Along with her 17-year-old boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp and her friend Shadolla Peterson, also 18, Pike lured Slemmer to an isolated area of the University of Tennessee’s Knoxville campus to brutally torture and kill her.
Peterson acted as a lookout while Pike and Shipp carved a pentagram into Slemmer’s chest with a boxcutter, beat her with a meat cleaver and repeatedly slashed her throat while she pleaded in vain for her life.
At the end of the horrific ordeal, which investigators said lasted at least 30 minutes, Pike murdered Slemmer by bashing her head in with a large chunk of asphalt and then kept a piece of her skull as a souvenir.
Lethal injection is the most common method of execution these days, and two separate attempts to kill Pike by that method failed, leaving her still alive and “snoring.” She is currently in the hospital—a murderer sentenced to death and given every bit and more of the due process the law requires—receiving treatment intended to keep her alive.
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Republican Governor Bill Lee has canceled all executions for 2026 and ordered an investigation.
How have we become so squeamish? Some states have entirely eliminated the death penalty, lacking the moral courage to finally punish the most monstrous and cruel among us, while the remaining 27 death penalty states have backed away from swift and sure methods like hanging and firing squads for the kinder, gentler lethal injection, which can take up to two hours to kill.
The Pike case has caused some to resurrect the old Eighth Amendment argument that execution is “cruel and unusual punishment,” particularly that the state supposedly gets only one chance to execute a murderer and thereafter, the Eighth Amendment is somehow automatically invoked. Such arguments conveniently ignore the cruelty suffered by a murderer’s victims and the lifelong suffering of those who loved them. That such arguments are usually made by people whose respect for the Constitution lies only in its utility in damaging the Constitution and rule of law goes almost entirely unremarked.
Is capital punishment immoral? And is having more than one, or in this case, two, attempts to apply it somehow more immoral? Does that failure somehow invoke new, special rights for the murderer?
Every state—some reluctantly—recognizes the right to self-defense. Doesn’t the state then have the power to kill those who have killed the innocent? Where’s the defining difference that favors evil rather than innocence?
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But the Bible says: “Thou shalt not kill.” Many making that argument aren’t fans of Christianity and don’t know they’re invoking the Sixth Commandment, or that the correct translation is “Thou shalt not murder.” The Bible and Torah both address Capital Punishment: biblehub.com/q/what’s_the_bible’s_view_on_execution.htm
“Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man his blood shall be shed; for in His own image God has made mankind.” (Genesis 9:6)
“Anyone who strikes and kills another man must surely be put to death.” (Exodus 21:12)
While Judeo-Christian texts and traditions uphold respect for individual life, both confirm that there are some crimes for which death is appropriate and morally justified. And both establish caution in meting out that penalty, which is the foundation for our system of justice and the seemingly never-ending due process—Pike had 31 years of it—convicted murderers enjoy.
In declaring ourselves so exquisitely civilized that we care far more for the rights of evil murderers than their victims and families and society, we are not cloaking ourselves in greater morality than the source of all morality, but making a mockery of His Word and His design and intentions for the human race.
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The solution for a failed execution is not to revive the murderer and prolong their suffering and the suffering of the victim’s survivors, nor to greatly extend a long-settled judicial review process, but to choose a certain and swift means of execution in the first place, and to apply it, as many times and as swiftly as necessary to see that justice is, at long last, finally done.
What method of execution could possibly be as cruel or crueler than that applied by Pike?
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Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, lifelong athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer, and high school and college English teacher. He is a published author and blogger. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.