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On 30 September, the state of Tennessee plans to put Christa Pike to death. She would be the third person brought to the death chamber in the Volunteer state this year, one of which was stopped after it was botched.
She would join 17 others who have been put to death there since 1960. None of them were women.
In fact in all of US history, only 578 women have been executed, a little more than 3% of our country’s total. The last one was Amber McLaughlin, killed in Missouri in 2024.
So, on the face of it, the fate that awaits Pike is unusual. But on second glance, it displays many of the hallmarks of America’s broken death penalty system.
Like many who end up on death row, Pike had an unspeakably difficult childhood. She was raped and abused and, when not being subject to such horrors, was abandoned and neglected by her parents.
So it was not surprising when Pike turned to violence, and with two others committed a murder when she was still a teenager. As the psychologist and trauma expert Bethany Brand explains: “At 18 years old, her immature, traumatized brain made her exceptionally vulnerable to impulses and extremely poor decisions … Unmedicated and untreated, she was not able to put the ‘brakes on’ her bipolar- and trauma-triggered emotions.”
When it came to her trial, Pike’s lawyer failed to present mitigating evidence that was readily available to him and to uncover any new mitigating circumstances. As the professor Deborah Denno explains: “Specifically, counsel chose not to present defendant’s social history evidence … claiming that the … materials in particular contained double-edged information,” namely information that might have hurt as well as helped her.
And now as she awaits her execution, she has legitimate concerns that, given her distinctive medical and emotional problems, when the state tries to kill her, she will face a torturous and cruel death.
But so far, courts have chosen to look the other way.
If they continue to do so, Pike will take her place among America’s relatively exclusive club of female execution victims. It is such a club because while women commit about one in eight homicides in the United States, they tend to commit murders that fall below the threshold of crimes that prosecutors, judges and jurors consider to be the worst of the worst.
As the professor Elizabeth Rappaport argues: “Two thirds of women who kill, kill family members and lovers … [and] [t]hese crimes almost never result in death sentences, regardless of the sex of the killer.”
Pike was obviously not one of those killers. And her victim was murdered in a gruesome manner.
A local television station in Knoxville, Tennessee, says prosecutors claim Pike “tortured and killed” her victim because Pike thought she was trying to steal Pike’s boyfriend.
This crime is reminiscent in its brutality to the one committed by Karla Faye Tucker in Texas in 1983. She and her co-defendant killed their victims with a pickaxe.
Tucker became something of a celebrity after having a sincere and profound religious conversion on death row. Texas Public Radio reports that her case “attracted national attention by many of America’s top televangelists, including Pat Robertson. He appealed to the Texas Governor George W. Bush … to commute Tucker’s sentence,” something that Bush refused to do.
Tucker was put to death in 1998, making her the first woman executed in Texas since 1863.
Fast forward to January 2021, when the federal government under Donald Trump executed Lisa Montgomery. Here, again the crime for which she was convicted was particularly gruesome.
In 2004, Montgomery crossed state lines “ostensibly to purchase a puppy from Bobbie Jo Stinnett, a 23-year-old dog breeder who was eight months pregnant. Instead, Montgomery strangled her, cut her fetus from her womb and tried to pass the surviving baby off as her own.”
Like Christa Pike, Montgomery “had brain damage and severe mental illness that was exacerbated by a lifetime of abuse, including child sex trafficking, gang rape and physical abuse largely at the hands of family members”.
She was killed by lethal injection, making her just the fourth woman ever executed by the federal government. It put a woman to death for the first time in 1865, when it hanged Mary Surratt for her role in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
At the time, according to the National Museum of Women’s History, “most people, including the military judges who issued the guilty verdict, could not believe the United States government was going to execute a woman.”
There is a bit of that sentiment reflected in the news coverage of Pike’s case. Even as this society seeks to achieve gender equality, there is still something unsettling at the prospect of putting a woman to death.
In Pike’s case, what should truly be unsettling is not her gender, but rather the prospect of putting to death someone whose crime was as much the product of society’s failure as it was of her criminal intent. For women as well as men, capital punishment offers no solution to the problems that give rise to the most serious crimes.
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Austin Sarat, associate dean of the faculty and William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, is the author of Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty
