Christa Pike’s lethal injection is booked for September 30. She may be the first woman Tennessee executes in 200 years.
Page A3From§Eachthe supper edition — 30 September 2026
Court pauses Tennessee's first female execution in 200 years by an hour, leaving May's ethics warning unanswered.
As it ran on the front
I had a renewal notice in my hand this morning — the kind that comes around every eight years or so, the sticker for the plates, the little card you tuck in the glovebox and forget until it's due again. I found it on the porch with the rest of the mail, and I was killing time before the shop opened, doing the math on the back of it, and it got away from me. Thirty-one years, I came up with. Three of these cards since 1995. The fourth one isn't due till next year.
Christa Pike's paperwork goes back to 1995 too. That's the year, the wire says, she tortured and murdered a nineteen-year-old classmate named Colleen Slemmer, and was convicted for it. She's fifty now. Thirty-one years between that conviction and this week — the same stretch as my three renewal cards, run back to back.…
…(cont) In May, by the state's own account, nurses who work around the execution chamber put something in writing: the lethal-injection method Tennessee uses, they said, flouts medical ethics. That word showed up in the reporting — flouts. It went on file. As far as I can find, nobody filed an answer to it. It just sat there, the way a claim sits in a drawer until somebody has to open the drawer.
On September 12th, with the execution already set for the 30th, Pike wrote to the governor asking for mercy. Eighteen days out, by the calendar nailed over my toolbox — the 12th to the 30th, eighteen squares. That's what the letter had to work with.
By the 22nd, with eight days left, the reporting was already calling her the possible first woman executed in that state in two hundred years. Eight days is not much runway for a two-century sentence to turn one way or the other.
Then Wednesday came. About an hour — the wire's own word for it, about — before Pike would have become that first woman in two hundred years, a federal appeals court stepped in. Two judges voted to pause it. One did not. The stay went out with an hour to spare, the way a call comes into the garage right as you're locking up for the night.
What the stay did not do, as far as I can find in anything filed, is rule on the nurses' letter from May. It didn't say the method passes. It didn't say it fails. It bought an hour's worth of room and left the rest of the drawer shut.
I still have that renewal notice on the dash. Three cards, thirty-one years, and every one of them came back from the county with an answer written on it — good for eight more, or it isn't, one or the other, in plain print on the front. Excuse me — before you go. The nurses' letter is dated in May. The stay is dated Wednesday. Which one of those two pages has the word "ethics" answered on it?
“They had a memo since May saying the needle itself might violate medical ethics, and the fix wasn't "let's answer that" — it was "let's wait an hour and see." That's not justice, that's a snooze button bolted to a gurney. The lady's still on death row, the nurses' letter's still in the drawer, and nobody in a robe has had to write pass or fail on it yet.”
“Look, an appeals court granting a stay is the system working exactly as designed — nobody's rushing anything, they just want the process right before anyone proceeds. This was never about the method being unethical, it's about due process, that's a completely separate question — did I just say the ethics complaint and the process are separate? That's not what I meant, forget I said that.”
Earlier in this story
- State's own medical staff already answered the ethics question judges are giving themselves more time to ask. By Lou · the noon edition, 30 September 2026
The receipts
Christa Pike tortured and murdered a classmate in 1995. She had been set to die on Wednesday, the first woman executed in the state in 200 years.
Christa Pike, 50, was sentenced to death after being convicted of the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer.
· Critics of Colleen Slemmer murder case argue Chirsta Pike doesn’t deserve the death penalty from the morgue, 12 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.