Christa Pike: 31 Years on Death Row, and the Botched Execution

Tennessee sentenced Christa Pike to death in 1996. Thirty-one years later, on September 30, 2026, the state tried to carry it out, and could not. Two doses of pentobarbital, about two hours, and she was carried from the death chamber still alive. We start there and ask the older question underneath it: when a society waits three decades and then cannot finish, is that mercy, justice, or something the Eighth Amendment was written to forbid. This episode runs two threads. First, the women: the two who helped kill Colleen Slemmer, and a state that has not executed a woman in roughly two hundred years. Then the long view, traced only through primary sources: the warrant in Genesis, the reluctance of the Sanhedrin, Draco and Solon, Caesar and Cato arguing it out on the Senate floor, Aquinas and Augustine, Beccaria on swift and certain punishment, and the Supreme Court from Trop to Furman to Gregg to Bucklew. We close with a brief pictorial history of how the death penalty has actually been carried out, from stoning to the needle, and the uncomfortable pattern that every new method was sold as the humane one. Chapters (times are approximate, set to the final cut) 0:00 The Botched Execution 5:00 The All-Women Executioners 11:30 The Case of Christa Pike 18:00 The Hebrew Verdict 23:30 Greece and Rome 28:30 Caesar and Cato 32:30 The Decadence Question 36:00 The Philosophical Precedent 43:00 Swift and Certain 47:30 Cruel and Unusual 53:30 Final Question 55:00 Methods of Capital Punishment 68:00 The Last Question Primary sources State v. Pike, 978 S.W.2d 904 (Tenn. 1998) Genesis 9:5-6; Mishnah, Sanhedrin 4:5 and Makkot 1:10; Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 41a Plutarch, Life of Solon 17 (Perseus): https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:2008.01.0063 Livy, History of Rome 10.9; Sallust, War with Catiline 51-52 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica II-II Q.64 (New Advent): https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3064.htm Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments (1764) Trop v. Dulles, 356 U.S. 86 (1958); Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972); Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U.S. 153 (1976); Bucklew v. Precythe, 587 U.S. 119 (2019); Glossip v. Gross, 576 U.S. 863 (2015) (Breyer, J., dissenting) Methods segment: Plutarch, Life of Artaxerxes 16; Code of Hammurabi, law 153; Acte for Poysoning, 22 Henry VIII c. 9 (1531); Report of the Aberdare Committee on capital sentences (1888) Further. Every. Day. A Christian worldview, one primary source at a time. Subscribe and turn on notifications. This episode discusses capital punishment and a violent crime. It is a sensitive subject. If you are struggling, reach out to someone you trust.