May Martinez left Florida with a pH๏τograph of her daughter and drove about eight hours to Nashville because September 30 was the day Tennessee had set to execute the woman convicted of killing Colleen Slemmer. Colleen was 19 in January 1995, a Job Corps student on the University of Tennessee campus in Knoxville, remembered by her mother as a girl in a “Computer Geek” shirt who painted buildings, roller-skated, and trusted people too easily. Martinez has spent decades arguing that the public learned the killer’s name and almost never learned the girl’s.

She fought for years to recover a skull fragment kept as evidence. She has said she does not believe in the kind of closure people offer parents in interviews, and she has said she believes Pike would kill again. The trip to the execution warrant was paid for in part by a roughly $2,500 online campaign. Her husband, Raul, went with her. What they arrived to was not an ending. The procedure at Riverbend was unfinished. Stays, court orders, and then the failure of two doses of pentobarbital left Pike alive and en route to a hospital. Martinez’s long drive became a pH๏τograph in a waiting room while the legal story snapped back to the defendant. That imbalance is the argument she has made since the 1990s.

Pike, convicted in 1996 of premeditated first-degree murder and conspiracy, received the full machinery of capital review: appeals, claims about childhood trauma and brain development, last-minute litigation, a Supreme Court order, and now a gubernatorial review of a failed execution. Colleen’s co-defendants drew different outcomes. Tadaryl Shipp received life with the possibility of parole. Shadolla Peterson received a lesser term. The victim’s mother got a warrant date, a crowdfunded tank of gas, and another night on which the headline belonged to the woman on the gurney. The botched procedure does not erase that complaint. It sharpens it. A state that cannot say what happens after the second syringe is still a state that knows the condemned woman’s full name, her age, her isolation cell, and her legal theory. The girl in the pH๏τograph remains, in her mother’s telling, the person the country has never quite managed to see.

Source: New York Post