It's My Mind: Alive After the Needle

This got my attention on Wednesday.

I am not for the death penalty. I also do not need a sermon to see what Christa Pike did in Knoxville in 1995. Those two things can sit in the same paragraph.

Tennessee tried to execute her at Riverbend. Courts spent the day opening and closing the door. The Sixth Circuit paused the warrant about an hour before the 10 a.m. time. The Supreme Court lifted that stay around 5:50 p.m. The state then ran the protocol late. Two syringes of pentobarbital. Witnesses heard her snoring with her mouth open. The curtains closed, opened, closed again. An ambulance left the prison. Governor Bill Lee froze the rest of the 2026 calendar and ordered a review. As I write this, she is alive.

If you never heard of the case, here is the short version. I asked Grok to summarize the crime.

CONTENT WARNING: The next section summarizes the crime. Skip it if you do not want those details.

Overview of the Christa Pike case

Christa Pike was 18 and Colleen Slemmer was 19. Both were students at the Knoxville Job Corps Center in January 1995. Pike’s boyfriend was 17-year-old Tadaryl Shipp. A third student, Shadolla Peterson, went along.

Pike believed Slemmer was trying to take Shipp and “running her mouth.” Slemmer’s friends denied it. The pentagram carved into Slemmer’s chest fed a satanic-panic reading of the case; court records and later reporting treat jealousy as the motive, not a ritual. Shipp was the one interested in occult imagery.

On January 12, 1995, they signed Slemmer out of the dorm on a peace-offering story—marijuana, or a trip to Blockbuster—and walked her to a secluded stretch of the University of Tennessee agricultural campus near an abandoned steam plant. Peterson watched. Pike and Shipp beat and slashed Slemmer for about half an hour with a box cutter (and, in some accounts, a meat cleaver). A pentagram was carved into her chest while she was still alive. When she tried to run, they caught her. Pike cut her throat and smashed her skull with a chunk of asphalt. Pike kept a piece of the skull and showed it around the center that night. The body was found the next morning. Arrests followed within about two days.

In March 1996 a Knoxville jury convicted Pike of first-degree murder and conspiracy. On March 30 she was sentenced to death (then by electrocution) plus 25 years on the conspiracy count. She was 20 at sentencing—the youngest woman put on death row in the modern era. Shipp, still 17 at the time of the killing, got life with the possibility of parole. Peterson testified for the state and did not go to prison.

The death sentence for Slemmer’s murder is what kept her on Tennessee’s row. The September 30, 2026 date was not called off in the morning. They administered the drugs that night. She lived.

My thoughts

My own opposition to the death penalty is more recent. The idea that the state can kill someone who did not do the crime is the part that doesn't sit well with me. It is easier to open a cell than to un-kill a person. You cannot hand back the years either way. You can at least stop adding a second irreversible act on a first mistake.

That is the innocence problem. This case is not that problem.

Pike is not a close call on the facts. A budding conflict became a half-hour torture killing. She brought a piece of the skull home like a souvenir. You still have to do something with a person capable of that. Life without parole is “something.” So is a competent execution. Wednesday was neither.

A botched attempt does not commute a sentence by itself. Willie Francis walked out of Louisiana’s chair in 1946 and was electrocuted the next year. Ohio failed Romell Broom on the needles in 2009 and the courts said the state could try again. Alabama failed two men on IVs in 2022 and later used nitrogen. The rare modern case that became life—Doyle Hamm in Alabama—took a settlement, not the botch alone. Lee has paused dates. He has not rewritten 1996.

I am watching what Tennessee does with a woman who received the drugs and kept breathing. The crime is thirty-one years old. The warrant is spent. The review will decide whether the next move is another date, a different method, or the cell she already occupies.