Tom Hicks | October 9, 2026
Editorial Note:
This article discusses a brutal murder, a failed execution, and the constitutional limits of capital punishment. Some descriptions may be disturbing.
Christa Pike is walking.
Not very far, and apparently not without considerable difficulty, but according to her attorneys, she’s taking a few steps around her hospital room. She’s also talking, although she reportedly has trouble concentrating and occasionally loses her train of thought. Her arms are severely injured, she has pneumonia, and doctors are still trying to determine how much permanent damage she may have suffered. As of Thursday, she was reportedly unable to swallow food or move her arms and hands properly.
Considering what happened to her eight days earlier, the fact that she’s walking at all is extraordinary.
On September 30, the State of Tennessee strapped Pike to an execution gurney and attempted to put her to death by lethal injection. Officials administered two doses of pentobarbital, a drug intended to kill her. According to witnesses and subsequent court filings, the procedure involved repeated difficulties establishing intravenous access, considerable pain, and a prolonged period during which Pike continued breathing despite receiving the drugs.
Eventually, the state stopped trying. Pike was transported to a hospital, where her condition deteriorated so badly that her attorneys were told she might be brain-dead. Plans were reportedly being made to withdraw life support when she unexpectedly regained consciousness.
Now she’s walking around a hospital room, recovering from an execution that was supposed to have killed her.
I don’t know about you, but I have a difficult time getting my head around that sequence of events. We’re talking about a government carrying out the most irreversible punishment it possesses, using a procedure specifically designed to end a human life, and somehow managing to leave the condemned person alive, hospitalized, and potentially permanently disabled.
And here’s where it gets even more troubling. Pike’s attorneys had warned the state that her medical conditions and difficult veins could create serious complications during lethal injection. Those concerns were raised in court. The execution proceeded anyway, with the Supreme Court declining to intervene.
According to reporting by the Associated Press and the Death Penalty Information Center, witnesses observed Pike continuing to breathe and move after the drugs were administered. Her attorneys described severe injuries to her arms and alleged that repeated attempts to establish intravenous access contributed to the failed procedure. The precise medical explanation remains under investigation.
I understand that medical procedures sometimes go wrong, even when everybody involved does everything correctly. But there’s a considerable difference between an unexpected complication and proceeding with a procedure after being warned about the very complications that subsequently occur.
Whether Tennessee crossed that line is something investigators and the courts will have to determine. I’m not going to pretend we already know the answer.
But I damn sure think we’re entitled to ask the question.
And before we go any further, there’s something else we need to discuss, because Christa Pike didn’t wind up on Tennessee’s death row for unpaid parking tickets.
She murdered a young woman named Colleen Slemmer.
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Colleen Slemmer was 19 years old when Pike, then 18, and two accomplices lured her into a wooded area near the University of Tennessee’s Knoxville campus in January 1995.
What happened there was horrifying.
Slemmer was beaten, tortured, and murdered. The attack was prolonged and extraordinarily violent. Pike was subsequently convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death in 1996.
There is no respectable way to minimize what happened to Slemmer, and I’m not interested in finding one. She was a young woman whose life was taken in an act of almost unimaginable cruelty. Whatever she might have become, whatever relationships she might have built, whatever ordinary pleasures and disappointments she might have experienced over the following three decades, all of it ended in those woods.
Her family has spent more than 30 years living with that loss. They’ve endured the trial, the appeals, the legal maneuvering, and the long wait for Tennessee to carry out the sentence. Slemmer’s mother witnessed the failed execution, and according to Associated Press reporting, she expressed anguish that the process had failed to deliver the justice she had waited decades to see.
I can’t begin to tell that woman how she should feel. Frankly, I wouldn’t have the nerve to try.
Imagine losing your daughter in circumstances like those, spending three decades waiting for the legal system to finish its work, and then watching the execution fail. Now you’re facing another investigation, another round of litigation, and the possibility that the whole miserable process could drag on for years.
That’s part of this story, too. And anyone who wants to have an intelligent conversation about capital punishment needs to acknowledge it.
But here’s the problem I keep running into.
I can recognize the brutality of Pike’s crime, understand why Slemmer’s family wants the sentence carried out, and still question whether the government has the constitutional authority to do what it did.
Those positions aren’t mutually exclusive.
In fact, I think that’s precisely where the difficult part of constitutional law begins. It’s relatively easy to defend somebody’s rights when you like the person. It becomes considerably less comfortable when the person has done something so monstrous that your first instinct is to say, To hell with her.
Except the Constitution doesn’t work that way.
The Eighth Amendment prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. It doesn’t contain an exception for particularly revolting murders, and it doesn’t give the government permission to disregard its limitations because the condemned person is difficult to sympathize with.
If constitutional protections mean anything, they have to apply when we’d rather they didn’t.
Which brings us to something I thought I understood about executions until I started looking into this case.
I was under the impression that if the state attempted to execute someone and botched the job, that was it. The state had taken its shot, the prisoner had survived, and another attempt would constitute cruel and unusual punishment.
Apparently, the Supreme Court disagreed with me about 80 years ago.
In 1946, Louisiana strapped a 17-year-old prisoner named Willie Francis into an electric chair and attempted to execute him. Something went wrong with the equipment. Francis received an electrical shock but survived.
Louisiana decided it wanted another opportunity.
Francis challenged the second execution attempt, arguing that forcing him to endure the procedure again violated constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment and double jeopardy.
The case eventually reached the Supreme Court, which ruled in 1947 that the failed execution did not automatically prevent Louisiana from trying again.
In Louisiana ex rel. Francis v. Resweber, 329 U.S. 459, the justices distinguished between an accidental failure during an otherwise lawful execution and the deliberate infliction of unnecessary suffering.
Francis was executed on the second attempt.
I had to sit with that one for a while.
Because if you’re telling me that a government can strap someone into an electric chair, send electricity through his body, fail to kill him, and then bring him back for another round, I think it’s reasonable to wonder exactly where the constitutional protection against cruel and unusual punishment enters the picture.
The Court’s reasoning was that an accidental failure didn’t transform the original sentence into an unconstitutional punishment. The state wasn’t deliberately attempting to torture Francis. It was attempting to carry out a lawful sentence, and the equipment malfunctioned.
I understand the legal distinction.
I’m less convinced that the distinction adequately addresses what happens to the person strapped into the chair.
And Tennessee’s situation presents another complication.
Pike wasn’t merely prepared for execution before officials discovered they couldn’t establish an intravenous line. The state administered two doses of lethal drugs. She experienced severe physical injuries, lost consciousness, spent days on life support, and now faces an uncertain recovery.
According to the Associated Press, hers is the first known American case in which a prisoner survived after lethal execution drugs were administered.
That’s an important distinction. There have been other botched executions, including cases where officials couldn’t establish intravenous access and abandoned the procedure. But Pike’s case involves drugs actually being administered, followed by survival.
And the state had been warned about possible complications beforehand.
Does that make another execution attempt unconstitutional? I don’t know. The Supreme Court hasn’t established a simple rule limiting the government to one attempt, and the circumstances of Pike’s case are sufficiently unusual that any legal challenge could break new ground.
But consider the underlying question.
If the state can administer lethal drugs, cause serious injuries, and then schedule another execution because the prisoner had the audacity to survive, where exactly does its authority end?
Does it get three attempts? Four? Does the answer depend on how badly the prisoner was injured the previous time?
At what point does carrying out a sentence become something else entirely?
And while I was wrestling with that question, I found myself wandering into the larger death penalty debate, which is a place I hadn’t particularly intended to go when I started researching this story.
I’ve never been able to get comfortable with capital punishment, although I understand why some people support it.
There are crimes so horrific that it’s difficult to imagine any punishment being sufficient. I understand the argument that certain people have forfeited their right to live, and I understand why victims’ families might see an execution as justice.
But I’ve always had two problems with the death penalty that nobody has managed to explain away to my satisfaction.
The first is what happens when we get it wrong.
Not when a conviction is overturned because of some procedural irregularity. I’m talking about executing somebody who was actually innocent.
And before anyone tells me our legal system has safeguards to prevent that, I’d like to introduce you to Tommy Lee Walker.
Walker was a young Black man arrested in Dallas, Texas, for the 1953 rape and murder of Venice Parker, a white woman. He maintained his innocence and had an alibi supported by witnesses. His pregnant girlfriend had gone into labor, and he was across town with her around the time the murder occurred.
Investigators nevertheless obtained a confession that Walker said was coerced. He was convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to death.
Texas executed him in the electric chair on May 12, 1956.
For the next 70 years, Walker remained a convicted murderer in the eyes of the law.
Then, on January 21, 2026, Dallas County officials formally declared him innocent.
A reinvestigation involving the district attorney’s office, the Innocence Project, and Northeastern University’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project uncovered evidence of racial prejudice, coercive interrogation tactics, and serious investigative misconduct.
The Dallas County Commissioners Court unanimously adopted a resolution acknowledging that Walker had been wrongfully convicted and executed. The Innocence Project documented the case and the long effort to clear his name.
Seventy fucking years.
Think about what that means.
The government arrested an innocent man, convicted him, strapped him into an electric chair, and killed him. Then it took seven decades to acknowledge that it had executed the wrong person.
Walker’s son was an elderly man by the time officials recognized what had happened to his father.
And here’s something else worth remembering. Venice Parker was murdered, too. Her family deserved justice, just as Colleen Slemmer’s family does. Convicting and executing an innocent man didn’t provide that justice. It compounded the original tragedy while allowing the actual killer to escape accountability.
That’s what wrongful convictions do. They create additional victims while leaving the original crime unresolved.
Now consider this.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, 203 people sentenced to death in the United States have been exonerated since 1973.
Two hundred and three.
Those aren’t people who were executed and subsequently cleared. They’re people who were sentenced to die and eventually exonerated before the government could carry out their executions.
And thank God for that.
But what bothers me is the question lurking behind the number. How many of those people would have been executed if the appeals process had moved faster? How many were saved because somebody uncovered evidence that should have been discovered before the trial? And how many innocent people weren’t fortunate enough to have somebody keep digging?
A peer-reviewed study estimated that at least 4.1 percent of people sentenced to death were wrongfully convicted. That doesn’t mean 4.1 percent of executed prisoners were innocent, and it would be irresponsible to suggest otherwise. But it tells us that wrongful convictions aren’t some imaginary problem invented by death penalty opponents.
They’re a measurable failure of the system.
And we’re talking about a punishment that cannot be reversed.
You can release somebody from prison. You can overturn a conviction, compensate the person, and attempt to restore some portion of the life the government stole.
You can’t bring somebody back from the dead.
I don’t care how many safeguards we put in place or how confident a prosecutor sounds at a press conference. As long as human beings investigate crimes, evaluate evidence, and decide guilt, there will be mistakes.
And when the punishment is death, one mistake is one too many.
My second problem with capital punishment is considerably more mundane. It’s the money.
Whenever this subject comes up, somebody inevitably argues that executing murderers saves taxpayers a fortune because we don’t have to feed, house, and provide medical care for them for the rest of their lives.
Sounds perfectly reasonable, doesn’t it?
Except there’s one problem.
It’s bullshit.
The Death Penalty Information Center’s analysis of capital punishment costs reports that death penalty cases generally cost taxpayers between 2.5 and five times as much as comparable cases resulting in life imprisonment.
And no, the drugs used in an execution aren’t the reason.
Capital cases require extensive investigation, specialized defense attorneys, expert witnesses, complicated jury selection, and considerably more preparation than ordinary murder prosecutions. Then come the appeals, which can continue for decades. Sometimes there are retrials, resentencing hearings, and additional litigation over execution methods.
All of that costs money. A hell of a lot of money.
In some states, the additional expense of pursuing a death sentence can run into millions of dollars per case.
Which raises a question I’ve never heard answered particularly well.
If we can keep someone convicted of a horrific murder imprisoned for life, without the possibility of parole, at a substantially lower cost, what exactly are we buying with the additional money?
Some people would say justice. Others might call it retribution. Victims’ families may believe an execution provides a measure of closure that life imprisonment cannot.
Those are arguments worth discussing, although the evidence that executions reliably provide closure is far from clear.
But let’s stop pretending the death penalty is some sort of taxpayer bargain.
It isn’t.
And while we’re talking about life imprisonment, there’s another part of this discussion that deserves more attention than it usually receives.
What does spending decades on death row actually look like?
For much of the modern death penalty era, prisoners condemned to die have frequently been held under conditions that most of us would find almost impossible to imagine.
We’re talking about spending 22 or 23 hours a day in a cell, sometimes more. Exercise, when permitted, might consist of a short period alone in a small enclosed area. Visits could be severely restricted, physical contact prohibited, and ordinary human interaction reduced to conversations with correctional officers, attorneys, or occasionally clergy.
Conditions vary considerably from state to state, and some jurisdictions have relaxed their restrictions in recent years. But according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a dozen states were still routinely holding condemned prisoners in single cells for at least 22 hours a day as recently as 2020.
Imagine living like that for decades.
I’m not talking about a weekend in a quiet room with a good book and nobody bothering you. I’m talking about years of having almost no meaningful human contact, no ordinary conversations, no opportunity to develop relationships, and very little control over the most basic details of your existence.
I don’t know how anyone emerges from that experience without being profoundly affected by it.
And then I discovered something about Christa Pike that stopped me in my tracks.
She spent approximately 28 years in what amounted to solitary confinement.
As the only woman on Tennessee’s death row, Pike was kept apart from the general prison population. She had little opportunity for meaningful interaction with other prisoners, limited access to ordinary activities, and almost none of the social contact most of us take for granted.
In 2024, she reached a settlement with Tennessee that allowed her to work and socialize with other incarcerated women.
Twenty-eight years before she could do something as ordinary as share a meal or have a conversation with another prisoner.
Now, I can already hear somebody saying that Pike deserved every miserable minute of it because of what she did to Colleen Slemmer.
Maybe that’s how you feel.
I understand the anger behind that reaction. But I’m not convinced that spending nearly three decades in extreme isolation serves any legitimate purpose beyond inflicting additional suffering.
The sentence was death. The years of confinement were supposed to be the period during which the legal system reviewed that sentence and ensured it had been imposed properly.
Somewhere along the way, however, the confinement itself became an extraordinary punishment.
And I find myself wondering how many people who enthusiastically support capital punishment have ever seriously considered what happens during those decades between sentencing and execution.
Because when you add prolonged isolation to the possibility of wrongful conviction, the enormous financial cost, and the continuing problems with execution methods, the whole system starts looking considerably less straightforward than its supporters sometimes suggest.
Which brings us back to Tennessee, where Christa Pike is recovering from an execution that didn’t work.
Governor Bill Lee has suspended executions for the remainder of 2026 and ordered an independent investigation into what happened. A judge has also ordered the preservation of evidence from Pike’s execution, including drugs, needles, intravenous equipment, recordings, and communications that could help establish exactly how the procedure unfolded.
The state maintains that officials followed its established execution protocol. Pike’s attorneys dispute the adequacy of that procedure and have raised serious questions about the injuries she suffered.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center’s October 8 report, the investigation will follow earlier scrutiny of Tennessee’s execution practices, including a 2022 review that led to changes in the state’s lethal injection protocol.
Think about that for a moment. Tennessee already had problems serious enough to warrant an investigation and changes to its execution procedures. Now it’s investigating another failed execution.
At some point, shouldn’t we be asking whether the problem is bigger than the particular combination of drugs, needles, and procedures being used?
And what happens to Pike now?
Her attorneys are seeking to have her death sentence commuted to life imprisonment. Whether Tennessee will eventually attempt to execute her again remains unresolved, and the legal challenges arising from the failed procedure could take years to settle.
I suspect the courts will spend a great deal of time examining what happened inside that execution chamber, what officials knew beforehand, whether the procedure was carried out properly, and how much suffering Pike experienced.
Those are important questions.
But I keep coming back to something more fundamental.
The government was authorized to execute Christa Pike. It attempted to do so. It administered lethal drugs, inflicted serious injuries, and came close enough to killing her that doctors reportedly believed she might never regain consciousness.
And she survived.
Does the state now get another opportunity?
I know what the Supreme Court said in 1947, and I understand why the government has an interest in carrying out lawful sentences. I also understand that Colleen Slemmer’s family has been waiting more than three decades for the justice system to reach its conclusion.
But I have a hard time accepting the idea that a government can keep attempting to kill someone until it finally gets the procedure right.
There has to be a limit somewhere.
And if the Eighth Amendment doesn’t establish that limit, I’d like somebody to explain exactly what protection it’s supposed to provide in a situation like this.
I’m not suggesting that Christa Pike should walk out of prison. Her conviction stands, and nothing about the failed execution changes the brutality of the crime for which she was sentenced.
I’m suggesting that perhaps the government has already done enough.
Pike has spent three decades in prison, nearly all of them under conditions of extraordinary isolation. She has now endured an execution attempt that left her hospitalized with serious injuries and an uncertain prognosis.
Colleen Slemmer remains dead. Her family remains without the finality they were promised. And Tennessee is left investigating how a supposedly controlled procedure went so catastrophically wrong.
There’s no happy ending available here. There hasn’t been one since a 19-year-old woman was murdered in 1995.
But we can still decide what kind of justice system we want to have.
And for me, that decision comes down to a question that ought to make every American uncomfortable, regardless of where they stand on capital punishment.
If the government tries to kill someone and fails, how many more chances should it get?
Because if the answer is as many as it takes, then what the hell does cruel and unusual punishment mean?
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THE BULLSHIT DETECTOR
Three unrelated claims. Three reality checks. No free passes.
1. Archaeologists Have Found Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat
💩💩💩💩 — FOUR OUT OF FIVE
CLAIM: A viral video shows archaeologists excavating Noah’s Ark near the summit of Mount Ararat in Turkey.
BULLSHIT: The video is AI-generated. No such excavation is shown.
WHY: An October 7 investigation by Lead Stories found a digital watermark indicating that the footage was generated using AI tools. The supposed excavation site also doesn’t match the actual location being investigated by researchers studying a boat-shaped geological formation in Turkey.
There are legitimate archaeological questions surrounding the region. This particular video answers none of them.
Apparently, artificial intelligence has reached the point where it can manufacture biblical discoveries without anybody having to get their sandals dirty.
2. A Giant Ocean Wave Swallowed a Ship on Camera
💩💩💩💩 — FOUR OUT OF FIVE
CLAIM: Dramatic footage circulating online shows an enormous wave completely engulfing a large ship at sea.
BULLSHIT: The video is artificial.
WHY: An October 8 Lead Stories investigation traced the footage to earlier social media posts identifying it as AI-generated. Two detection systems also found strong evidence that the images were synthetic.
Ships encounter dangerous seas all the time. This one appears to have encountered a graphics processor.
3. The BBC Reported Testimony About Organized Child Abuse in Cemeteries
💩💩💩💩💩 — FIVE OUT OF FIVE
CLAIM: A circulating screenshot purports to show a BBC report alleging that 60 children testified about organized sexual abuse involving police officers and doctors.
BULLSHIT: The supposed BBC article is fabricated.
WHY: An October 7 Lead Stories fact-check found no evidence that the BBC published the story. The screenshot originated from an account that identifies itself as parody and satire.
Sexual abuse is a serious subject. Inventing horrific allegations and dressing them up as legitimate journalism doesn’t expose wrongdoing. It exploits the subject to manufacture outrage.
And the people sharing it apparently couldn’t be bothered to check whether the article existed.
MORE FROM TOM HICKS MEDIA
Off Script with Tom Hicks — Independent journalism, political analysis, and the stories behind the headlines. Sunday’s Blind Spot examines what conventional coverage misses.
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What the Hell? — Real stories so ridiculous they sound invented. Unfortunately, they aren’t.
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ONE QUESTION BEFORE YOU GO
If a state attempts an execution and the prisoner survives, should the government be allowed to try again?
Yes. The original sentence still stands.
No. One attempt is enough.
Only if a court determines the first attempt wasn’t cruel or unusual.
I’m opposed to capital punishment altogether.
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