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Tennessee tried to kill Christa Pike on Wednesday night, and it failed. Inside Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, prison staff pushed two doses of pentobarbital into her body. According to Kim Chandler, the Associated Press reporter who witnessed it, Pike looked toward prison officials and asked if it was supposed to feel that way.
When the media witnesses were led out at about 8:53 p.m., Pike could still be heard snoring, “clearly very alive.” An ambulance took her to a hospital, and her attorney says she is alive and receiving medical care.
The botched execution came one year to the day after Pope Leo XIV stood outside Castel Gandolfo on Sept. 30, 2025, and answered a question from an EWTN reporter. “Someone who says, ‘I’m against abortion,’ but says, ‘I’m in favor of the death penalty,’ is not really pro-life,” the pope said.
None of this takes away from what Pike did. In January 1995, when she was 18, she and two other students at the Job Corps center in Knoxville took 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a classmate, to a wooded part of the University of Tennessee campus and tortured her to death. Slemmer’s family has carried that loss for 31 years, and they deserve our prayers today. Church teaching leaves room for both grief and justice.
It also asks whether Tennessee must kill again in Colleen’s name.
A governor who prays in public
Gov. Bill Lee had the power to say no. He is an evangelical Christian in the eighth and final year of his governorship, and he has put his faith at the center of it. On Sept. 1, Lee proclaimed Sept. 18 a statewide day of prayer and fasting, asking Tennesseans to “humble ourselves before the Lord.”
On Sept. 10, Tennessee’s three Catholic bishops (J. Mark Spalding of Nashville, David Talley of Memphis and Mark Beckman of Knoxville) wrote to Lee: “We respectfully ask that you halt the execution of Ms. Pike.” On Sept. 28 the governor denied clemency and said he did “not plan to intervene.”
“I certainly don’t turn off my spiritual or moral compass in making a decision like that,” Lee told Crux in 2019, when asked how his faith shapes his choices on executions. A woman who killed at 18 has spent 31 years in a cell, nearly all of them as the only woman on Tennessee’s death row, and a governor who leads his state in fasting still wanted her dead.
That is a desecration of the faith he professes.
After the injections failed, Lee ordered a third-party review and halted the remaining execution scheduled for this year. Tennesseans, he said, expect executions to be carried out in a way that is “effective.”
What I saw in Bledsoe County
As a native Tennessean, I have found this horrific to watch. It is also, sadly, familiar. When I ran for Congress in 2020, the coronavirus tore through the Bledsoe County Correctional Complex in my district and infected about a quarter of the men held there, and I saw up close how the Tennessee Department of Correction treats the people in its care and the officers who guard them.
I tried to make it a national issue. Records I obtained through a public records request showed that the department did not begin testing its staff systematically until April 10, Good Friday. The Washington Post reported on all of it in May 2020, telling the story of an officer’s wife and an inmate’s girlfriend whom I had brought together on a Facebook Live broadcast. “These communities, ordinarily opposed, are now participating in the same struggle,” I told the paper.
The department has not earned more trust since. In 2022, Lee stopped the execution of Oscar Smith about an hour before it was set to begin because the drugs had never been tested for endotoxins, and an independent review later found years of skipped testing.
The MAGA reaction
Michael Knowles, the Daily Wire host and a Catholic, wrote on X this morning: “Have the state executioners considered taking Christa Pike to the woods and crushing her skull with a rock?” A year ago, Knowles was attacking the Church’s teaching on the death penalty. In March, he delivered the keynote address at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast.
JD Flynn, editor of The Pillar, posted Knowles’s words beside EWTN’s coverage of that breakfast. In the replies, he asked whether a person who talks that way should be “feted as an exemplary Catholic.” Flynn and I don’t always agree, but I admire him for telling the truth here, and he has been consistent about it: he is, he wrote, “opposed both to abortion and calls to crush the skulls of people with rocks.” Plenty of MAGA replies cheered Knowles on instead, including one that called his post “the most based thing I’ve ever seen Michael Knowles tweet.”
Sen. Marsha Blackburn, the Republican nominee to succeed Lee, wrote that “the answer is simple: bring back the electric chair.” Last year’s reaction to the pope ran along the same lines. Knowles’s Daily Wire colleague Matt Walsh called it a “really terrible answer from Pope Leo.”
What the Church teaches
Leo did not invent this teaching. Pope John Paul II wrote in Evangelium Vitae in 1995 that the cases where execution is truly necessary “are very rare, if not practically non-existent.” Four years later, standing in St. Louis, he called the death penalty “both cruel and unnecessary.”
Pope Francis finished the work in 2018, revising the Catechism to say that “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.” Leo has carried it forward. In April, he sent a video message to Illinois marking 15 years since the state abolished capital punishment: “In this regard, we affirm that the dignity of the person is not lost even after very serious crimes are committed.” (As Robert Prevost, he had thanked Gov. Pat Quinn for signing that abolition in 2011.)
I keep thinking about Sister Helen Prejean, who has spent more than four decades sitting with condemned men and women and telling the country what happens in its death chambers. Ohio offers a lesson too. Gov. Mike DeWine, a Catholic Republican, has kept his state’s executions on hold with one reprieve after another, most recently on Aug. 7, and in June he called on the legislature to abolish the death penalty outright.
One of the lawmakers leading that fight is state Rep. Jean Schmidt, a Republican who once represented southern Ohio in Congress. “I hold my pro-life beliefs firmly, and I support the full repeal of the death penalty,” she said in June.
My one hope after Wednesday night is that Tennessee, and the country, will finally start to reconsider a system in which the state can fail to kill a woman strapped to a gurney and answer with a promise to do the job better next time. Christa Pike is still alive this afternoon, and the challenge Pope Leo issued a year ago is waiting for Bill Lee and for every Catholic who cheered Knowles this morning.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV, with Tennessee’s bishops and with every Catholic who believes that the dignity of a human person survives even the worst thing she has ever done.
Colleen Slemmer’s life mattered. The Church insists that Christa Pike’s life carries the same dignity, even after what she did, and a state that pushes two doses of poison into a prisoner and then calls the failure an administrative matter for review has lost sight of both women. The Gospel will not let us look away.
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They are providing evidence every day who is the un-evolved, and barbaric.
It’s time for these so-called “Christians” to remember that Jesus was the victim of state sanctioned execution.