Colleen Slemmer was 19. She and Christa Pike had met at a Job Corps site in Knoxville, a program for teenagers and young adults in trouble. On January 12, 1995, Pike and Tadaryl Shipp took Slemmer into woods near an abandoned steam plant. For roughly half an hour they beat and cut her. A pentagram was carved into her chest while she was alive. Pike struck the fatal blows with a piece of asphalt and later kept a fragment of skull. The cruelty of the killing, not only the death, is why prosecutors sought and a jury returned a death sentence the following year. Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, traveled toward Nashville for the September 30 execution. A fund drive had raised money so she could come from Florida. PH๏τographs of her daughter were displayed outside Riverbend. She was there to see a sentence finished. She watched a process that did not finish.

The crime has never been seriously disputed on the question of who killed Slemmer. What has been disputed for thirty years is whether death was the right penalty for an 18-year-old whose trial lawyers, later courts were told, did not put on the mitigation a capital jury is supposed to hear. Defense accounts describe rape at 11, a suicide attempt at 12, abuse by a mother’s boyfriend, probation as a juvenile, and a placement in a North Carolina program that did not hold. Pike was an adult under the law that applied in 1995. A later attempt to reopen the case under juvenile-brain rulings failed because she was 18, not 17. In 2001 and 2002 she asked to drop appeals and be executed, then continued litigating after courts would not let the case end that way. Federal habeas relief was denied in 2016 and affirmed by the Sixth Circuit in 2019. None of those rulings erased the murder. They also did not answer the question families of the condemned and families of the ᴅᴇᴀᴅ ask in different words: what does the state owe the victim when it cannot carry out the punishment it announced?

Martinez’s position, as reported around the warrant, was that the sentence should be done. Anti-death-penalty groups marched from the prison toward the Capitol in the days before the date. Pike’s team asked Lee for mercy and was refused on September 28. The botched procedure did not convert the 1995 facts into something milder. It did place Slemmer’s family in a second kind of waiting. A death warrant that ends in a hospital transfer is not closure. It is an unfinished sentence sitting beside an unfinished medical chart. Pike remains under a death judgment even while intubated. Lee has said executions under his watch are stayed through the end of the year. He has not commuted her sentence. Shipp, the co-defendant who carved the pentagram, is serving life and has a parole window. Peterson, the lookout, received probation. The person who delivered the fatal blows is the one the state tried, and failed, to kill.

Any honest account of September 30 has to hold both records at once. Slemmer was tortured and murdered by people she knew from a jobs program. Pike has spent nearly three decades under a sentence imposed for that killing, and she committed a separate violent crime in prison in 2001. The state’s failure to kill her cleanly does not rewrite January 12, 1995. It does create a new harm with its own witnesses: a condemned woman speaking about pain in her arm after the state had already begun to execute her, and a victim’s mother who came for an ending the protocol could not deliver. The review Lee ordered is about the chamber. It will not retry the murder. The murder is why the chamber was in use.

Source: New York Post