This State Hasn’t Executed a Woman in 200 Years. It Is Picking the Worst Possible Way to Go Back.

The United States rarely executes women, no matter how gruesome their crimes. In fact, only 18 women have been put to death in this country in the past 50 years.

That translates to around 1 percent of the executions carried out in that period. The last one occurred on Jan. 3, 2023, when Missouri killed Amber McLaughlin.

On Sept. 30, Tennessee plans to add a new name to the list of women put to death: Christa Pike, who was 18 years old when she tortured and murdered 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in 1996, making Pike the youngest woman sentenced to die under the modern death penalty.

On Friday, W. Mark Ward, a judge appointed by the Tennessee Supreme Court to review her case, gave the go-ahead for Pike’s execution, ruling that the state’s execution process would not violate her constitutional rights. His decision downplays the suffering she will endure when the state puts her to death.

Pike, who the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty describes as having been the victim of “child sexual abuse, multiple rapes, and parental abandonment and neglect,” would be the first woman executed in the Volunteer State since 1819.

If her history of abuse and neglect were not enough to raise questions about the appropriateness of her death sentence, there is also the fact that neither of her two co-defendants received a similar punishment. One of them was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole, and the other was paroled after cooperating with investigators.

All of this highlights the injustices that mark Pike’s case and the fact that her execution would be a spectacle of cruelty. That’s without even getting to the method of execution.

Even the most ardent death-penalty supporters should recognize that this horrific execution should not go forward. If the courts don’t stop Pike’s execution, the public should urge Gov. Bill Lee to spare her life .

In June, following the botched execution of Tennessee death row inmate Tony Carruthers, Pike’s lawyers asked the Tennessee Supreme Court to find that it would be unconstitutional to execute her following the same protocol used in Carruthers’ case.

Tennessee’s new lethal injection protocol, calling for a single drug (pentobarbital), is plagued with the same issues that have marked botched executions for decades: secrecy, intentional omission, inattention to detail, and untrained and unlicensed prison personnel attempting to fill a medical role.

They called the court’s attention to Pike’s “individual physical characteristics that include, but are not limited to, Thrombocytopenia/Thrombocytosis, Bipolar disorder, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, hyperlipidemia, and small veins that make insertion of a needle difficult.”

And they added that “the Plaintiff’s Bipolar disorder and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder make it sure or very likely that her isolation” for 14 days prior to her execution “will result in unnecessary and superadded pain and suffering, terror, and disgrace.”

In Pike’s case, Ward held several days of hearings and listened to a number of experts.