Nervous About The Process (Op-Ed By Steve Abramowicz)

until further order of this court…

Image Credit: Canva.

Note from The Tennessee Conservative: Editorial statements in this column are the sole opinion of the author; they do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the staff of this publication.

Submitted by Steve Abramowicz of Heartland Journal –

Just this Wednesday I was on the air with Olivia from Tennessee Conservative News talking about how the death penalty doesn’t apply to child rape if the child doesn’t die — that’s the Supreme Court’s rule, and fine, that’s the law.

But the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals taught me something new: apparently the death penalty doesn’t fully apply to murder either — not when the method might scare the person being executed.

Because that’s the only way to read what happened in Tennessee today. The penalty of death, we are now told, must be administered peacefully. Comfortably. Maybe with a conversation. Light a candle, burn some incense, hand out lilies, I guess — regardless of how horribly the victim died. Crazy days.

Christa Pike killed 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in Knoxville in 1995 — a brutal, senseless murder committed when Pike herself was barely more than a teenager. It is incredibly rare for a woman to be sentenced to death in this country, so you know it was bad if she was going to die. Only 18 women have been executed in the modern death penalty era, which began in 1977. The most recent was Amber McLaughlin in Missouri in 2023 — unlucky her, I guess, wrong circuit. 8th not 6th. Women account for 1% of all executions; men account for the other 1,664. Experts say that’s because women commit fewer violent crimes. Fine.

Researchers have also found that 96% of women on death row were raped, sexually abused as children, or subjected to domestic violence before their arrest. I mention that because Pike’s lawyers built a 226-page clemency petition on exactly that — her age at the time of the crime, and the claim that her trial attorney never told the jury she was a victim of extensive child sexual abuse and multiple rapes.

And so we’re clear about what kind of guest of the state we’re talking about: while on death row, Pike tried to kill a fellow inmate with a shoelace. Not exactly time served with good behavior.

Now watch the dominoes fall. Less than a week before the execution, the Tennessee Supreme Court denied her request for a stay, finding she “failed to demonstrate a likelihood of success on the merits of her claims.” Governor Bill Lee confirmed Monday he would not step in to keep Pike alive past her September 30 execution date. The U.S. Supreme Court denied her final stay request yesterday, September 29. So that should have been it. Last chance. But…

The Sixth Circuit issued a stay this morning, filed just before Pike’s execution was scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. Quote the order: “The United States District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee determined that it did not have jurisdiction over Christa Pike’s Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 60(b)(6) motion to reopen the judgment denying habeas relief… Therefore, it is ORDERED that execution of the sentence of death upon the movant is STAYED until further order of this court.”

Read that again. Nobody ruled that her claims were good. Nobody ruled that she’s innocent of the procedural mess. The court simply wasn’t sure the lower court was *allowed* to say no — so until they sort that out, no execution. Her lawyers called it the court “recognizing the serious concerns about Christa’s scheduled execution.” Mind you, this is the court whose territory is Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee — 16 judges, based in Ohio — and it found a reason that the Governor of Tennessee (state’s rights) and the United States Supreme Court (federal, all nine) both passed on.

The “serious concerns” are the protocol arguments. In a hearing last month, Pike’s team argued the state’s execution protocols would make her death torturous because of her physical, medical, and psychological conditions, including PTSD. The state’s answer: she’d be moved to Riverbend Maximum Security Institution 24 hours before, and the goal was that she’d be observed only by female corrections staff. Keep Riverbend in mind for a second.

Riverbend is where Tony Carruthers was supposed to be executed in May, until medical staff spent over an hour failing to establish IV access and the state gave up — an attempted execution so botched it prompted a pause from Governor Lee. It’s where Anthony Darrell Hines was put to death in August for the 1985 murder of Catherine Jean Jackson Jenkins — so the machinery demonstrably worked a month ago. And the doctor involved in the Carruthers attempt, Mark Fowler, is the one overseeing Pike’s. That’s the thread the anti-death-penalty groups pulled, and they found a friendly hearing in the Sixth Circuit to buy her time that a Governor and the U.S. Supreme Court didn’t deem worthy. (Very much like the mistrial that jury handed that Clancy woman who killed her kids. The court system is busted.)

Pike’s letter from death row: “When my people showed up for me — they have showed up and showed out! I am humbled beyond words.” And this: “Whether my clemency is granted or not, I am at peace. I am not afraid to die. I am only nervous about the process.”

There it is. Nervous about the process. Colleen Slemmer didn’t get a process. She got thirty years of her mother waiting for justice.

There are currently 45 women on death row across the country, so at this rate we’re going to see this four dozen more times. California has the most, 17 — though Governor Gavin Newsom has ordered that no executions take place since 2019, so those ladies can relax. New York, 7, and Texas, 6, have executed the most women since 1900. Not a lot.

Slemmer’s mother, after the stays started falling: “Maybe now finally we have justice. It may not bring my daughter back, but it might save another person from getting killed because she will do it again.”

That was the whole point. Not the candle. Not the incense. Not the lilies. Somewhere tonight, lawyers are racing in front of sixteen judges in Ohio over whether a federal court was allowed to hear a motion — so that a woman condemned for one of the ugliest murders in Tennessee history doesn’t have to be nervous about the process. Her victim didn’t even get a stay of the parking lot.

– Status is live: The stay is “until further order of this court” — the state can (and likely will) run back to the Sixth Circuit en banc or the Supreme Court within hours/days. as of this writing.

– The 96% abuse figure comes from research on women on death row — (DPIC/researchers).

About the Author: Steven M. Abramowicz is CEO and Editor of Heartland Journal.com and host of the Heartland Journal podcast.