Tennessee Poison

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, October 02, 2026

 

Assessing the conditions in Reading Gaol, Oscar Wilde remarked: “If this is the way Queen Victoria treats her convicts, she doesn’t deserve to have any.” I wonder whether We the People of the United States deserve to have any convicts at all, or condemned men—or condemned women.

 

The story of Christa Pike, whom Tennessee officials have—so far—twice tried to poison to death, would be the blackest of black comedy if there were any comedy in it. Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, being a Republican in 2026, is funny only unintentionally, saying of the twice-botched execution of his state’s only condemned female murderer: “Tennesseans deserve a justice system that is fair, that’s consistent, that is faithfully administered. My responsibility is to uphold the sentences that Tennessee juries have handed down, even when it’s difficult, and that is exactly what we intend to do in the days ahead.” If words mean anything, then the governor’s words would seem to mean that his state intends to try to kill her again in the interest of consistency and faithful administration and responsibility. I am tempted here to take the Lord’s name in vain.

 

There are many bad arguments against capital punishment: that an innocent person might be wrongly convicted (which is an argument against trials and punishment per se), that the willful taking of human life is categorically evil (as though war-making and self-defense were not unhappy necessities), that a death sentence cannot be reversed (as though we could give a wrongfully convicted man back his lost decades or the whole of a life sentence), etc. There are better arguments against capital punishment: One is that capital punishment is bad for the executioners (and, this being a republic, we are all executioners), which ought to be obvious to anybody who has been present at one of those festive “Burn, baby, burn!” rallies death-penalty enthusiasts sometimes stage outside of an execution or to anyone who has heard Donald Trump hold forth on the subject. Americans’ naturally violent temperament and our tendency toward religious fanaticism (which sometimes is disguised as political fanaticism) make us gleeful executioners who invariably debase and degrade ourselves when wielding the instruments of death.

 

Another argument against capital punishment is that we are not very good at it.

 

We are not very good at it in the particular instances—botched executions such as the one in Tennessee are surprisingly common—and we are not very good at it in the big picture, either, applying the lethal sanction willy-nilly, often to the wrong cases and the wrong categories of cases. A wiser society would consider death sentences, if it considered them at all, for serious crimes of a political nature, meaning crimes against the state and crimes against the public order. One teenage drug peddler in Chicago killing another teenage drug peddler in Chicago is, in the big picture, a mostly private affair, though there is a political aspect to the lawlessness of our cities. Crimes against the public order are more like the sort of thing we saw at the Capitol on January 6, 2021: sedition, rioting, corruption in high office, abuses of political power. Which is not to say that we need to drag every corrupt cop or senator or riot instigator in front of a firing squad, but crimes of that nature are distinct from the merely vicious crimes often described as common. (And they are too common, of course.) Such crimes necessitate the pursuit of justice, but prosecuting them and punishing them with a heavy hand also is an act of political self-defense, a necessary thing in a republic.

 

Catholic teaching (and much Protestant teaching) has largely held that putting criminals to death is acceptable when it is necessary for ensuring the protection of the defenseless against further violence at the hands of the lawless. That the Catholic authorities in the United States and elsewhere have interpreted this as amounting to a general prohibition on the death penalty is the result of technical rather than moral considerations: Given the penal powers of the modern state, putting offenders to death does not present itself as a practical necessity. The Catholic analysis of the case is reasonable and reasonably persuasive.

 

There is no question, to my mind, at least, that such a figure as Christa Pike deserved the death sentence—her crime was atrocious and cruel, involving not only the murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer but also her torture: Convicting Pike was made easier by the fact that she had kept a broken-off piece of her victim’s skull as a keepsake and had shown it off to friends at school. Slemmer’s family is still awaiting the return of the last piece of her skull for burial, having received from the state, so far, only a portion of the skull. The 1995 crime defines heinous—but there is no absolute necessity, moral or practical, for Pike’s death.

 

As a matter of moral judgment, one might reasonably come down either way on the question.

 

As a matter of practical judgment, there is less room for disagreement: If Tennessee is going to wield the power of life and death in this slapstick fashion, then Tennessee does not deserve to have it. The governor has suspended executions for the moment; the legislature should move to get rid of them altogether, out of shame, at least, if not out of any sincere regard for decency.