Lee still has the pen

On Wednesday a reporter asked Gov. Bill Lee whether Tennessee will try again to execute Christa Pike, or whether he will commute her sentence to life. He did not pick either.

“As it related to a particular individual like Christa Pike and her crime, she’s still incarcerated under the laws of the State of Tennessee,” he said. “I suspect her sentence will be the same as before unless determined otherwise by the courts.”

She is still incarcerated. That part is true. Pointing at the courts is not an answer. It is a description of the forum that now has to stop the state, if he will not.

He still has the pen. The Tennessee Constitution lets the governor grant reprieves and pardons after conviction. If a pardon is not warranted, state law lets him commute a death sentence to life in prison. He does not need a judge to unlock that. He already used it. On Sept. 28, two days before the attempt, he refused: “After deliberate consideration of Christa Gail Pike’s request for clemency, and after a thorough review of the case, I am upholding the sentence of the State of Tennessee and do not plan to intervene.”

Two days later the state carried the sentence as far as its protocol goes. She lived. That fact takes this out of his suspicion and into the Eighth Amendment.

Pike was 18 when she killed Colleen Slemmer, 19, on Jan. 12, 1995, in Knoxville. Both were in Job Corps. A jury found the murder involved torture. Pike confessed. She has not denied it. Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, told the Associated Press she had waited decades, and that she still thinks about her daughter trying to get up and run. The family called the failed attempt “a mess.” Nothing in the chamber unwrites the murder. A commutation is not an acquittal. Tadaryl Shipp, 17 at the time, is serving life with the possibility of parole. Life is a sentence Tennessee already knows how to impose for this crime. It is also the punishment the Constitution still allows.

What the state inflicted on Sept. 30 was something else.

Witnesses put the start at 7:26 p.m., after the Supreme Court lifted a Sixth Circuit stay issued that morning. Pike said she was leaving with love. Minutes later she said her arm felt like it was about to burst. A second dose followed. She was still breathing. Catherine Sweeney of WPLN said the breathing was ragged, that Pike lifted her head, and that she asked if a burning spot was normal. At 8:40 p.m. a caller inside Riverbend told 911 she was still alive after 10 grams of pentobarbital. Her lawyer had to call 911 himself. She left by ambulance, snoring, and spent days on a ventilator. Her lawyers say both arms were swollen, burned, and blistered. The state has not published a finding on how the lines failed. It does not have to. She was given the punishment. She felt it. She lived through it.

The Department of Correction said that night that it followed every step of the protocol, and that the protocol does not allow any further procedure. Then it sent her to a hospital. Followed every step, and the steps ran out, and she was alive. The Eighth Amendment does not wait on a rewrite of that page.

The amendment says it in so many words. Cruel and unusual punishments shall not be inflicted. Those words bind Tennessee, not only the federal government. A punishment is cruel when it is torture, or a lingering death, something beyond the extinguishment of life. Pike was not spared by a switch that failed to throw. She was given two doses of the drug meant to kill her. She was awake for it. She said it burned. She survived it, and the state’s own script had nothing left to offer but an ambulance. We believe that is cruel and unusual punishment. The ban is explicit. That this night falls inside the ban is the inference the text requires, and we do not think it is a close one.

The case the state will cite does not cover a second attempt. In 1947 the Supreme Court let Louisiana try again to electrocute Willie Francis. Justice Reed, for a four-justice plurality, called the failure an accident and assumed officials had acted carefully and humanely. “Accidents happen for which no man is to blame.” Justice Frankfurter, whose vote allowed that second try, said a cruelly willful attempt, or a series of failed attempts, would be a different case. The Baze plurality later drew the same line. An isolated mishap, unforeseeable and nobody’s fault, is not the violation. A warned failure is. Pike’s lawyers had told the state her veins could fail. On Sept. 23 the Tennessee Supreme Court called that risk speculative, and called the chance she might survive too speculative to grant a stay. Then it happened. This was also the second execution Tennessee failed to carry out this year. In May the state spent more than an hour trying to find a vein in Tony Carruthers and stopped before the drug went in. An accident no one could see coming is one thing. Two doses, a living prisoner, and a protocol that ends in a hospital is the case Francis left open.

Some will say she has to name another way for the state to kill her before a court can step in. That pleading rule was written for a fight over method, a prisoner asking the state to change the protocol before it is used. It is not a rule that officials may inflict this and then make her design the next attempt. The way to remove the risk is the punishment Tennessee already uses for this crime. If a court treats “propose another way to die” as the price of relief, it has the amendment turned around. The text forbids the cruel punishment. It does not make the person who survived it draft the sequel.

Lee suspects the courts will have to determine otherwise. On the forum, he is closer than he means to be. A Tennessee court does not commute a death sentence. A federal court does not either. What a federal court does, and what it now has a duty to do, is restrain the state.

The Constitution is supreme over a death warrant. State officials do not get to finish a punishment the Eighth Amendment forbids because the governor would rather not decide. The claim is federal. It runs against the officials who would strap her down again, under the same civil-rights suit federal courts have used for a century to stop a state officer from violating the Constitution. The remedy is an injunction. That is the override. Not a pardon signed by a judge. A restraint. Tennessee may keep her in prison for the murder of Colleen Slemmer. It may not take her back to that room.

Lee can still make the injunction unnecessary. He weighed clemency on the record as it stood on Sept. 28. The record changed when his own department followed its script to the last line and called an ambulance. If he will not commute, he does not get to wait the courts out, and the courts do not get to wait on him. He pointed at them. The job he pointed at is to stop the state.

Colleen Slemmer is the reason a sentence exists. She is not a reason to inflict a second punishment the Constitution already forbids.

Sources: WSMV, Oct. 28, 2026 (Lee’s comments); Gov. Lee clemency statement, Sept. 28, 2026, as reported by The Tennessean; Tennessee Department of Correction media advisory, Sept. 30, 2026; Associated Press via NPR, Oct. 1, 2026; PBS NewsHour, Oct. 1, 2026 (Catherine Sweeney; the family’s “a mess”); CNN timeline of the witness clock; JURIST, Oct. 14, 2026 (the Sept. 23 order, the Carruthers attempt, the 911 written account); Louisiana ex rel. Francis v. Resweber, 329 U.S. 459 (1947); Baze v. Rees, 553 U.S. 35 (2008); Tenn. Const. art. III, § 6; Tenn. Code Ann. §§ 40-27-101, 40-27-105. The burned-arm description is from Pike’s lawyers’ Oct. 2 court filing, not a state medical report. The 10-gram figure is from the emergency-communications written account of the 8:40 p.m. call. Martinez’s quote is from an AP interview before the attempt, about the murder.