Tennessee has once again contorted itself into crude spectacle on the national stage. Just four months after the failed execution of Tony Carruthers, which resulted in a one-year reprieve for Carruthers issued
by Gov. Bill Lee, the state botched its attempt to put convicted murderer Christa Pike to death.
For months and years to come, critics will justifiably compare the Carruthers and Pike cases, noting, perhaps, that Pike's scheduled execution on Sept. 30 felt like déjà vu.
But déjà vu, the sudden feeling that a current moment has already been lived, is an involuntary reaction. Experts say it’s caused by a misfire in the mind, some momentary glitch when the wires get crossed between the part of the brain that processes new experiences and the part that houses the familiar. The present feels like the past, but it’s not. It’s an illusion.
This, though? This deplorable display of “governance,” wherein the state of Tennessee has been granted absolute authority over the very essence of a human’s life and chooses to wield it recklessly? That is no illusion. That is a completely predictable outcome of the savagely inhumane institution of capital punishment.
A murderous history
By now, we all know the details of the wretched scene that unfolded inside the execution chamber of Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.
A state official pushed a lethal dose of pentobarbital into Pike’s vein, and then another. Hours later she was still alive. Because the powerful drug failed to stop her heart, she was taken by ambulance to an area hospital where she received lifesaving care.
As the dark of night gave way to a new day’s sun, my journalism colleagues, both at The Tennessean and other outlets around the country, began to piece together a timeline, a chronological understanding of the tragedy and Tennessee’s general incompetence in the act of sanctioned killings.
In 2022, Gov. Bill Lee issued a stay on all executionsafter the Tennessee Department of Corrections admitted that it had failed to follow its own execution protocols. An independent investigation later found those issues had been ongoing; the department had failed to consistently test lethal injection drugs for potency, purity and contaminants for years.
In August 2025, the state was successful in killing Byron Black, though the execution wasn’t without error. Witnesses said Black was in painduring the process, and he exhibited cardiac activity for at least two minutes after he was pronounced dead.
Then came Carruthers.
Coming to terms with murder
For nearly 90 minutes on May 21, executioners poked and prodded and carved into Carruthers’ body, attempting to set the two IV lines needed to administer the drugs that would end his life. Dr. Mark Walton Fowler moved to set a central line in his chest, though he had not performed the procedure in over a decade. He didn’t even have hospital privileges to do so. Fowler pressed forward as Carruthers complained about the pain, as the warden allegedly told him to “just do his job.”
The job, of course, is state-sanctioned murder. Literally. On the death certificate of a an inmate executed by the state of Tennessee, the cause of death is listed as homicide, the act of one person taking the life of another.
We don't tend to think of it this way. We like to place the act committed by Pike – in which she carved a pentagram into the chest of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, bashed her head in with a rock and collected a chunk of her skull as a souvenir – and the one the state attempted against Pike in separate buckets. We justify one murder and not the other; we play God and decide who deserves to die.
Indeed, many of those in favor of the death penalty point to Pike's cruelty against Slemmer as justification for any cruelty she may have endured at the hands of the state. Yet there are others – capital punishment moderates, if you will – who are unmoored by the recent events in Tennessee's execution chamber, this national spectacle we've become. They want to support capital punishment only in the right instances, when carried out properly.
They are the people who oppose firing squads for their excessively bloody horror, hangings for their historical ties to vigilante mobs, electrocutions for the putrid smell of burning flesh. These, they say are cruel and unusual, inhumane, the wrong way to kill someone.
But there is no right way to kill, no method of execution that is humane. It follows, then, that anyone who can conjure a justification for its use should be willing to accept it in its most barbaric form: when the vein can't be tapped and two lethal doses can't finish the job, when their tax dollars must then be spent to save the life teetering too close to the edge but not far enough.
There is no honor among thieves, you see, so neither can it exist among killers. To demand proper protocol from a murderous state is akin to asking for an escalator to the moon or an assurance that the man who made you his mistress will never cheat on you. It is an exercise in futility.
There is no humane way to execute
You don’t lie down in a lion’s den and expect it that carnivorous beast to kiss you softly on the cheek. Why, then, would we put the power of life and death in the hands of men and women and expect those men and women to deal justly? What is justice if not righteousness and integrity, and how can either be displayed through slaughter?
If you can find an answer to that question – perhaps one that links Pike's heinous murder of Slemmer, and attempted murder of a fellow inmate, to the 30 years she spent on death row – you surely won't stand alone. But you must understand that you aren't just demanding vengeance and calling it fairness, asking for Pike's eye as restitution for Slemmer's.
You are standing in full support of the state's actions, providing legal cover for Tennessee to take up its sword against one of its own as well as the financial means by which to do so. And you are allowing the egregious mistakes and the callous disregard, because no matter what you think about Pike's burned and blistered arm, where the pentobarbital sat just below her skin instead of dispersing through her veins, you already decided her life was irredeemable, her death the only reasonable recourse.
So now, as the review begins and the resignations are filed, you must confront your own culpability. For there is no reform for legalized homicide and no way to clean up the gruesomeness of murder, no matter who exacts the punishment.
It is always violence, is always brutality, is always wrath. In Tennessee, it is also law.
Andrea Williams is an opinion columnist for The Tennessean and curator of the Black Tennessee Voices initiative. She has an extensive background covering country music, sports, race and society. Email her at adwilliams@tennessean.com or follow her on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @AndreaWillWrite and BlueSky at @andreawillwrite.bsky.social.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: How Tennesseans are to blame for Christa Pike's failed murder | Opinion
