The state that could not protect Christa Pike now schedules her death

On September 30, 2026, Tennessee is scheduled to put Christa Pike to death by lethal injection, the first woman the state has executed since 1820. On September 5, the Guardian reported the detail underneath the case: Tennessee never arrested one of the men who raped her as a child. It could not protect the girl. It is ready to kill the woman.

Colleen Slemmer was nineteen. On January 12, 1995, Pike and two others lured her into the woods and tortured her for roughly half an hour. Pike cut her throat, struck her with a meat cleaver, carved a pentagram into her chest, and crushed her skull with a slab of asphalt. She kept a fragment of the skull as a trophy. Nothing that follows lessens any of that.

Pike was eighteen. Before that she was a child exposed to alcohol in the womb, neglected, and raped by several people before she reached school age. The psychologist Bethany Brand, who assessed her in 2023, found she had survived worse trauma than ninety-nine percent of the country. Her boyfriend that day, months younger, drew a life sentence and is now eligible for parole. The line the state drew at eighteen is doing a great deal of work.

Ezekiel wrote to exiles who believed God had written them off, showing them their own beginning: a newborn thrown into an open field, cord uncut, left in her blood to die because no one wanted her. In verse 5, no eye pities her. Then someone passes by and speaks life over the blood. Every institution that should have spoken that word over Christa the child stayed silent. The one now preparing to speak is saying the opposite.

James warned believers against fawning over the powerful. Then he sharpened it.

James 2:13For judgment is without mercy to him who has shown no mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment.

The first sentence falls on Pike. She gave Colleen Slemmer no mercy, and judgment answers in kind. The second is harder, and it is not aimed at her. It is aimed at whoever holds the needle.

A court can weigh what a woman did at eighteen. Whether the state that left her in that field has any standing to end her life is a question it has not answered.