Doctors in Tennessee are attempting to save the life of a woman whom the state just tried to kill. “Kafkaesque” is a term so overused that it has become a banality, but how else can one characterize the chain of events that occurred on September 30th?
Christa Pike was eighteen years old when she murdered her classmate, Colleen Slemmer, in 1995. A year later, she became the youngest woman to receive a death sentence in the modern era. This past Wednesday, at 8:17 A.M., an hour or so before the now fifty-year-old Pike was scheduled to be executed, an appeals court granted her legal team’s request for a stay of execution “to properly analyze the parties’ fully briefed arguments and resolve the issues on the merits.” By late afternoon, the Supreme Court, which had denied her a stay earlier in the week, vacated it. At Riverbend—a maximum-security prison in Nashville where Pike, the only woman on Tennessee’s death row, has long been held—there were media witnesses, prison personnel, lawyers, Slemmer’s mother, and a spiritual adviser gathered. Pike said her last words, an offering of love to those who loved her and those who hated her, and prepared. An execution team sent a rivulet of pentobarbital through her left arm. Pike remained conscious, though, and spoke, asking whether it was normal that her arm felt like it might burst. A second syringe was administered. Pike appeared to lose consciousness, but was observed to be snoring, indicating that she was still breathing. An hour crept by. She did not die. Lawyers made emergency calls, and a decision was made to halt the proceedings, which had lost the veneer of sobriety and had tipped into a scene of government depravity, the vague zone of punishment deemed by the provisions of the Eighth Amendment as “cruel and unusual.”