On Wednesday night, the State of Tennessee gave Christa Pike two doses of pentobarbital in an attempt to carry out an execution. She survived. By Thursday, the governor had called off all executions for the rest of the year, and her lawyers were asking for commutation. A former Justice Department lawyer was telling Fox News that the state should try again. The Church has a short answer to that last suggestion, and it rests on one claim about what a crime can and cannot take from a person.
The News Story
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has called off the state’s remaining executions for 2026 and ordered an outside review after Christa Pike, the only woman on Tennessee’s death row, survived two doses of pentobarbital on Wednesday night at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. Pike, 50, was taken by ambulance to a nearby hospital. Her attorneys said Thursday that she was alive and receiving lifesaving medical care, and Fox News and ABC News reported that she was in critical condition. The Tennessee Department of Correction has not publicly described her condition.1
Pike was convicted of the 1995 killing of Colleen Slemmer, 19, a fellow student at the Job Corps center in Knoxville. Pike was 18. Court records describe a prolonged beating and stabbing in a wooded area, and prosecutors said she acted with two others, Tadaryl Shipp and Shadolla Peterson. Sentenced in 1996 at age 20, Pike was the youngest woman sent to death row in the modern era of American capital punishment. Had the sentence been carried out, she would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in about 200 years.2
The execution was set for 10 a.m. Central Time on Wednesday, September 30. Shortly before then, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit stayed it by a 2-1 vote to consider whether Pike’s history of childhood sexual abuse had been fully weighed at sentencing. The U.S. Supreme Court vacated that stay around 6 p.m. by a 6-3 vote. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in dissent, wrote that the order “unnecessarily prevents that court from giving due consideration to Pike’s claim.”3
Media witnesses, including an Associated Press reporter, said the chamber curtains opened at about 7:26 p.m. In her final statement, Pike said, “I’m at peace, and I’m ready to go.” After the drug began, she coughed, complained of pain in her arm, and appeared awake, at one point looking toward officials and asking whether it was supposed to feel that way. The curtain closed and reopened, and witnesses heard loud snoring. It closed again at 8:05 p.m. Witnesses were escorted out at 8:53 p.m. while Pike could still be heard breathing. A late-night court filing by her lawyers said she still had a heartbeat after two doses. The death warrant expired at midnight.4
Lee said carrying out a lawful sentence “is among the State’s most serious responsibilities” and that Tennesseans expect it to be done in a manner that is “legal and constitutional” and “effective.” He ordered “a comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred” and said the one other execution scheduled this year, that of Gary Wayne Sutton, will not be carried out in 2026. The Department of Correction said it “followed every step” of the state’s established protocol.5
It is Tennessee’s second failed execution in roughly four months. On May 21, the state called off the execution of Tony Carruthers after staff spent more than an hour trying to place an IV line.6
Pike’s attorneys, Randy Spivey and Kelly Gleason, said the state had “once again failed to carry out a lawful execution” and that they had warned beforehand of blown veins, degraded pentobarbital and the lack of emergency medical care. They have asked the Tennessee Supreme Court to commute her sentence, and Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, urged the governor to do the same. Reaction has divided along familiar lines. On Fox News, former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo argued that Tennessee should carry out the sentence by another attempt, while The Washington Post placed the case among several recent botched executions around the country.7
Catholic Social Teaching Analysis
Two Questions From One Room
Two questions came out of the execution chamber at Riverbend on Wednesday night. The first is technical, and it’s the one Gov. Bill Lee has taken up. He said Tennesseans expect a lawful sentence to be carried out in a manner that is “legal and constitutional” and also “effective,” and he has ordered an outside review to find out what failed.8 What went wrong with veins and drugs: a review can answer those.
The second question is a moral question, and John Yoo set that question before us, on Fox News, within a day. Should Tennessee try again?9 It’s a fair question to ask out loud. Plenty of people will be asking it at their kitchen tables this week, and it deserves an answer that starts in the right place.
Start With Colleen Slemmer
The right place is a wooded spot near the Job Corps center in Knoxville in 1995, where a 19-year-old named Colleen Slemmer was beaten and cut for a long time before she died. Court records describe what was done to her. I will spare you the gruesome details and won’t repeat them here. Whatever this week has meant for Christa Pike, it has also dragged the worst day in the Slemmer family’s life back into the national news.
The Church asks no one to minimize what happened to Colleen Slemmer and the pain that it has caused her family. The Catechism says that legitimate public authority “has the right and duty to inflict penalties commensurate with the gravity of the crime,” and that “the primary scope of the penalty is to redress the disorder caused by the offense.”10 The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church gives the state a twofold job: to discourage behavior that harms human rights and “to repair, through the penal system, the disorder created by criminal activity.”11 Punishment is a real good, owed above all to the victim. A society that shrugged at what happened in those woods would fail Colleen Slemmer a second time.
Christa Pike has been punished for 31 years now. What remains open is whether the state may kill her.
Where St. Thomas Stood
I owe readers some candor here, because I often look to St. Thomas Aquinas for the answer to most of the questions I raise. However, on this question we stand on opposite sides.
Thomas asked whether it is lawful to kill sinners, and he said yes. His argument is an image from medicine: “if the health of the whole body demands the excision of a member, through its being decayed or infectious to the other members, it will be both praiseworthy and advantageous to have it cut away.” The community is the body. So “if a man be dangerous and infectious to the community, on account of some sin, it is praiseworthy and advantageous that he be killed in order to safeguard the common good.”12 When an objector protested that killing a man is evil in itself, Thomas answered that by sinning a man “falls away from the dignity of his manhood.”13
Read Saint Thomas carefully. His case rests on the concept of danger. Human justice, he wrote, “puts to death those who are dangerous to others.”14 The surgeon cuts because the limb threatens the body. Thomas lived in a world without maximum-security prisons, where a convicted killer could escape, or buy his way out, or be freed by his friends. I think a fair reader has to ask what his surgeon would do with a 50-year-old woman the state has held behind steel for 31 years, most of them alone, and whom it now has to keep alive in a hospital bed. On his own terms, the argument is thin.
The Point Where the Church Has Moved
Thomas’s reply about lost dignity is where the Church’s teaching has developed. In 2018 Pope Francis approved a revision of the Catechism, and its central sentence answers Thomas almost word for word: “there is an increasing awareness that the dignity of the person is not lost even after the commission of very serious crimes.” It gives two more reasons: a new understanding of what penal sanctions are for and “more effective systems of detention,” which protect citizens “but, at the same time, do not definitively deprive the guilty of the possibility of redemption.” Then it states the conclusion: “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person,” and the Church “works with determination for its abolition worldwide.”15
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith explained to the bishops how the revision fits what came before. It called the revision “an authentic development of doctrine that is not in contradiction with the prior teachings of the Magisterium.” Those earlier teachings, it said, came from “a social context in which the penal sanctions were understood differently, and had developed in an environment in which it was more difficult to guarantee that the criminal could not repeat his crime.”16 That is Thomas’s century exactly.
And the road to 2018 was a long one. The Compendium, published in 2004, already counted “a growing public opposition to the death penalty” among the signs of hope, because “modern society in fact has the means of effectively suppressing crime by rendering criminals harmless without definitively denying them the chance to reform.” It said the cases in which execution is absolutely necessary “are very rare, if not practically non-existent.”17
Behind all of it stands a sentence of St. John Paul II, which Pope Francis repeated in Fratelli Tutti: “not even a murderer loses his personal dignity, and God himself pledges to guarantee this.”18 Scripture shows the pledge four chapters in. The first murderer in the Bible killed his own brother, and God put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him (Genesis 4:15). Francis drew the consequence for the rest of us: “If I do not deny that dignity to the worst of criminals, I will not deny it to anyone.”
So, Try Again?
Apply that to Thursday’s question. The governor’s review will look for a better drug or a better needle. Some commentators have floated the firing squad. Each of those answers is about the means. The Church’s objection runs much deeper than the means. The Congregation, quoting Pope Francis, said the death penalty “regardless of the means of execution” entails “cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment.”19 A smooth execution on Wednesday would have been just as inadmissible as the one that failed. What the failure did was let the country see the situation for what it is: a woman on a gurney asking whether it was supposed to feel that way, and a curtain pulled shut so the witnesses couldn’t watch the rest.
The particulars of Pike’s case add weight to the situation. She was 18 when she committed that horrible crime. Her lawyers say her childhood sexual abuse and mental illness never reached the jury properly, and a federal appeals court thought that claim deserved a hearing before the Supreme Court lifted its stay. Fratelli Tutti names “the possibility of judicial error” among the old and well-known arguments against capital punishment, and it asks Christians to work as well “for the improvement of prison conditions, out of respect for the human dignity of persons deprived of their freedom.”20 Thirty-one years as the only woman on Tennessee’s death row, mostly in isolation, belongs in that sentence too.
Mercy here would cost something, and the Church acknowledges that. Pope Francis recalls that St. Augustine, during the trial of the men who had murdered two priests, begged the judge to spare their lives: “Our desire is rather that justice be satisfied without the taking of their lives or the maiming of their bodies in any part.” Saint Augustine added a line that every Catholic in Tennessee could tape to the refrigerator this week: “Do not let the atrocity of their sins feed a desire for vengeance, but desire instead to heal the wounds which those deeds have inflicted on their souls.”21 Augustine was pleading for men who had killed priests of his own Church.
What I’d Watch
Pay close attention to the Tennessee Supreme Court and the governor’s desk. Pike’s lawyers have asked for commutation, and the power to grant it sits with Bill Lee. Catholics in Tennessee can ask him to use it, plainly and respectfully, and ask him to make this year’s pause permanent.
Finally, pray! Pray for Colleen Slemmer, and for her family, who did not choose to have her death retold this week. Pray for Christa Pike in her hospital bed. Pray for the officers and medical staff who stood in that room on Wednesday night and will carry it home. And pray for Gov. Lee, who holds a woman’s life in his hands this morning.
This story turns on the inviolable dignity of the person: a dignity no crime can forfeit, which is why the Church now teaches that the death penalty is inadmissible.
One principle from the Church’s social teaching, applied to the week’s news, in your inbox each Saturday.
Notes
- ↑ “Tennessee cancels executions after Christa Pike survives botched lethal injection,” CBS News, accessed October 2, 2026, cbsnews.com; “Christa Pike in critical condition ‘receiving life-saving medical care’ after botched execution, attorneys say,” ABC News, accessed October 2, 2026, abcnews.com; “Lawyers, experts urge Tennessee governor to commute Christa Pike’s sentence after botched execution,” Fox News, October 1, 2026, foxnews.com.
- ↑ CBS News, “Tennessee cancels executions”; Fox News, “Lawyers, experts urge Tennessee governor”; “Christa Pike stalled execution: Witnesses describe chaos, confusion,” FOX 5 Atlanta, accessed October 2, 2026, fox5atlanta.com.
- ↑ ABC News, “Christa Pike in critical condition”; “Tennessee Botches Another Execution Despite Earlier Warnings from Attorneys; Christa Pike Was Alive Hours After Attempt Began,” Death Penalty Information Center, accessed October 2, 2026, deathpenaltyinfo.org.
- ↑ FOX 5 Atlanta, “Christa Pike stalled execution”; CBS News, “Tennessee cancels executions”; “Christa Pike execution fails: What next when a lethal injection is botched?,” Al Jazeera, October 1, 2026, aljazeera.com; Death Penalty Information Center, “Tennessee Botches Another Execution.”
- ↑ Death Penalty Information Center, “Tennessee Botches Another Execution”; ABC News, “Christa Pike in critical condition”; CBS News, “Tennessee cancels executions.”
- ↑ Death Penalty Information Center, “Tennessee Botches Another Execution”; Ed Morrissey, “Hmmm: Another Botched Execution in Tennessee,” Hot Air, October 1, 2026, hotair.com.
- ↑ ABC News, “Christa Pike in critical condition”; Fox News, “Lawyers, experts urge Tennessee governor”; “Fox’s John Yoo Says TN Has to ‘Try Again’ with Christa Pike,” Mediaite, accessed October 2, 2026, mediaite.com; “Christa Pike’s botched execution is the latest of several recent cases,” The Washington Post, October 1, 2026, washingtonpost.com.
- ↑ Death Penalty Information Center, “Tennessee Botches Another Execution”; ABC News, “Christa Pike in critical condition.”
- ↑ Mediaite, “Fox’s John Yoo Says TN Has to ‘Try Again.’”
- ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 2266, vatican.va.
- ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 402, vatican.va.
- ↑ Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 64, a. 2, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, in New Advent, newadvent.org.
- ↑ Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 64, a. 2, ad 3.
- ↑ Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 64, a. 2, ad 2.
- ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2267.
- ↑ Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Letter to the Bishops Regarding the New Revision of Number 2267 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church on the Death Penalty (August 1, 2018), no. 8, vatican.va.
- ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 405.
- ↑ Pope Francis, Encyclical Letter Fratelli Tutti: On Fraternity and Social Friendship (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, October 3, 2020), no. 269, vatican.va.
- ↑ Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Letter to the Bishops, no. 6.
- ↑ Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti, no. 268.
- ↑ Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti, no. 265.
Books Cited
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- Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition (Doubleday / Image, 2003)
- Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Latin-English edition, Complete Set (Aquinas Institute / Emmaus Academic, 2012)
Is there someone you find it hard to believe still has a dignity worth protecting?