Christa Pike Likely to Remain on Death Row

Let's be quiet for a second and get this one right. Christa Pike, convicted of the 1995 torture and murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in Knoxville, survived a failed lethal injection in Tennessee on September 30. The Washington Examiner reports her attorneys released a statement exactly one month later saying she remains in pain and is recovering, and that "healing is not the same as being okay." She is being held in the infirmary at the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center, largely isolated from others.

Her lawyers have asked Gov. Bill Lee to commute her sentence, and Lee has signaled it is likely to stay in place. Lee has paused the remaining executions this year and ordered an independent review, and the state prison chief has resigned. Whether the state will try again, and whether Lee will grant clemency, is not settled. A jury decided what Colleen Slemmer's killer had earned, and her family has waited thirty years for that sentence to be carried out.

“healing is not the same as being okay.”Christa Pike, via Washington Examiner