Death row goes DEI — and the execution still goes off the rails

America has been inundated with sob stories from female murderers over the past few months. First, it was Lindsay Clancy, otherwise known as the Exercise Band Executioner of Duxbury, Massachusetts. Prosecutors say Lindsay deliberately strangled her three children; she pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. Now after a mistrial, her lawyer insists there is a “total and complete lack of evidence” that smiling Lindsay killed them. A judge rejected that bid Thursday.

Maybe JonBenét Ramsey’s killer, who is still on the loose, climbed in the Clancy window and did what Mom is being unfairly blamed for?

Remember when drawing, quartering, and beheading were the only special treatments criminals got?

Recently, the soap opera moved farther south to Tennessee, a state that had not executed a woman since 1819. The convicted female death-row inmate in the news is 50-year-old Christa Pike, condemned for the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer.

Pike’s lethal injection was scheduled for Wednesday at 10 a.m. CDT. Concerned about being traumatized, Christa demanded special treatment at her execution.

Christa took diversity, equity, and inclusion to new heights by requesting that women handle the execution because of her history of sexual abuse. Her attorney later said it appeared Tennessee honored the request.

Remember when drawing, quartering, and beheading were the only special treatments criminals got?

Pike also challenged Tennessee’s lethal-injection protocol because of her small veins and a blood disorder. Her lawyers proposed a central line or even hanging as alternatives. It’s a shame no one thought of Lindsay Clancy; she is both a nurse and a woman. If Pike had requested that wheelchair-bound Clancy be flown in from Massachusetts to tenderly place the IV line in the femme fatale’s arm — then if that had failed, who better than Lindsay to enforce the alternative?

Poor Christa said she had been living in constant fear, unable to sleep and hoping the IV would go in cleanly. She did not want to end up like Tony Von Carruthers, the Tennessee death-row prisoner whose execution was called off in May after officials spent more than an hour trying and failing to establish the required backup IV line.

After a day of appeals, a temporary Sixth Circuit stay, and the U.S. Supreme Court clearing the way for Tennessee to proceed, Christa finally found herself eight miles from Music Row in Nashville, in a sanitized execution chamber at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, about to be ushered into Nirvana by the all-female team she had requested.

The curtain opened at about 7:27 p.m. Witnesses saw Christa strapped to a gurney and prepped for lethal injection. Pike received pentobarbital and remained conscious long enough to smile, move, and complain that her arm hurt.

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Photo by John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

The curtain closed, reopened, then closed again. Witnesses could still hear Christa breathing and snoring behind it. Tennessee administered a second dose. That one didn’t kill her either.

Her attorney demanded that officials stop the execution and provide emergency medical care. At 8:53 p.m. — 86 minutes after the curtain first opened — Christa Pike was still alive, and witnesses were ordered out.

Instead of a hearse, an ambulance eventually shuttled Pike from Riverbend to a hospital. As of Thursday afternoon, her lawyers said she remained in critical condition receiving “life-saving care”. Gov. Bill Lee (R) halted Tennessee’s remaining executions for the year and ordered an independent review.

No one scooped Colleen Slemmer up on that freezing winter night in Knoxville and ferried her away. Slemmer’s unrecognizable body wasn’t found until the next morning.

Christa’s journey to Riverbend started on January 12, 1995, when she was 18 years old. The night before, she told friend Kim Iloilo that she intended to kill fellow Job Corps student Colleen Slemmer because she “had just felt mean that day”. Pike believed Colleen was interested in her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp.

The next night, Pike, Shipp, Slemmer, and Shadolla Peterson left the Job Corps center together. Only three came back.

Pike later told Iloilo that Colleen had begged them to stop. Instead of mercy, Christa cut the 19-year-old woman’s throat, beat her, and cracked her skull with a piece of asphalt. Pike said a meat cleaver was used to cut Slemmer’s back and a box cutter to cut her throat. A pentagram was carved into Slemmer’s forehead and chest.

Then Pike came back with a souvenir: a piece of Colleen’s skull.

The next morning, with the skull fragment still in her pocket, Pike bragged to classmate Stephanie Wilson about the killing. Pointing to brown spots on her shoes, she said, “That ain’t mud on my shoes, that’s blood.”

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John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe/Getty Images

On January 13, a University of Tennessee groundskeeper found Slemmer’s brutalized body and testified that it was “so badly beaten that he had first mistaken it for the corpse of an animal.”

Pike was convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder and sentenced to death in 1996. Her prison résumé did not improve. In 2001, she choked inmate Patricia Jones unconscious with a shoelace and was later convicted of attempted first-degree murder.

With execution looming, Pike’s lawyers filed a 226-page clemency petition. They said she was sexually abused by her grandmother’s boyfriend between ages 2 and 5, raped by a neighbor at 11, and raped again by a stranger at 17. They also cited bipolar disorder, PTSD, suicide attempts, and other mental-health problems.

Granted, if Christa’s accounts are true, they are tragic. But even all that does not justify one woman brutally torturing and murdering another woman. And then, three decades later, she had the gall to ask for women around her execution gurney to lessen the “trauma.”

In the end, it is almost as if karma circumvented compassion. After all the argument over who would touch Christa, how the IV would be placed, and how much suffering the state could lawfully impose, Tennessee gave her two hefty doses of the death drug and still failed to kill her.

Now Pike remains hospitalized in critical condition with a dire prognosis — which is considerably more medical attention than Colleen Slemmer received after Christa bludgeoned her to death.