I have been covering Lindsay Clancy and Christa Pike at the same time, and I cannot get over what the contrast says about us.
Both women killed. One case is still being argued. The other had a scheduled time and a witness list.
Update, Wednesday morning: The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals stayed Pike's execution about an hour before it was set to be carried out at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti immediately asked the Supreme Court to lift the stay (WSMV). As this posts, the Supreme Court has not ruled and the stay stands. Witnesses and media are still at the prison. Everything below was written before that order came down. None of the argument depends on how today ends.
Two women, two vocabularies
Lindsay Clancy killed her three children, and we are still talking. Still holding hearings, filing motions, dissecting her diagnosis, her medications, her doctors, her intent, her capacity, whether the system failed her, whether the jury understood the law, whether the prosecution proved its case.
Her case is still treated like a question, and I understand why. She was a nurse, a suburban mother, three little kids, snowmen and crafts, a medical system her defense says failed her. Women heard that story and thought, "Jesus Christ, that could have been me."
Christa Pike was eighteen years old when she murdered Colleen Slemmer.
What Pike did was fucking horrific. Colleen was nineteen. She was tortured and murdered, and her mother has spent thirty years living in the aftermath of something no parent should ever have to comprehend. Nothing about Pike's age, childhood, mental illness, or trauma makes Colleen less dead. Nothing makes the crime less brutal. Nothing turns Pike into the victim of Pike's crime.
But this morning, the State of Tennessee was scheduled to kill her at 10 a.m. And it makes me fucking sick.
I still know what the verb is
I hate the death penalty because I do not understand what we think we become when we do it back. We take killing, the thing we claim is so morally obscene that it can permanently remove someone from the human community, and then we reproduce it deliberately. We put it on government stationery. We create procedures, witness lists, protocols, and a scheduled time. Then we pretend the legality transformed the act.
It didn't.
A person is alive. The state restrains her, introduces chemicals into her body for the explicit purpose of making her dead, someone records the time, and everybody goes home. You can call it punishment, closure, justice, or a sentence. I still know what the verb is.
Kill.
And I fucking hate that we have convinced ourselves that authority somehow changes the morality of the act.
Nothing gets completed
The death penalty does not resurrect Colleen Slemmer. It does not give her mother thirty years back. It does not rewind 1995 or undo one second of what happened. It creates one additional dead person and gives everyone the comforting illusion that justice has prevailed.
Nothing is completed. Colleen is still dead. Her mother is still a mother whose daughter was murdered. Christa Pike would just be dead too.
Mercy is a mirror
Covering these two cases beside each other makes our selective morality impossible to ignore. One woman gets an entire vocabulary devoted to understanding her: psychosis, medication, trauma, diagnosis, capacity, intent, responsibility, mitigation. The other gets a fucking countdown clock.
We like to pretend mercy is a principle. I think mercy is a mirror.
We are very good at finding humanity in people whose suffering looks familiar. Suburban. Educated. Married. A nurse. Someone whose photographs look like ours, whose doctors sound like ours, whose life we can imagine living.
Then suffering gets ugly. Poor. Violent. Chaotic. The crime becomes grotesque enough, the defendant stops looking like somebody from the neighborhood, and suddenly we become philosophers of personal responsibility.
Suddenly, trauma is an excuse. Brain development doesn't matter. Severe mental illness doesn't complicate anything. Eighteen is old enough to understand everything forever. Rehabilitation becomes irrelevant because we have decided that a human being is permanently frozen at the worst moment of her life.
Once somebody becomes the devil
Christa Pike's story was practically written before most people knew her name. It was 1995. There was a pentagram. There was a skull fragment. She became the devil in the story, and once somebody becomes the devil, everything gets easier to ignore.
You never have to ask what happened to her. What severe childhood sexual abuse, starting at age 2, does to a developing brain. Whether eighteen and fifty are the same human being. What thirty years means. Whether somebody who did something unforgivable can nevertheless remain human.
And you certainly never have to ask the more uncomfortable question: what does it say about us that we need this person dead?
That is why I hate the death penalty. Not because I think everyone sentenced to death is secretly innocent, good, or misunderstood. Some people have done things that are almost unbearable to read about. That is exactly when principles are supposed to mean something.
If human dignity only applies to sympathetic people, it isn't a principle. It's a preference. If our rejection of killing only applies to people we like, it isn't much of a moral position at all.
Even an execution needs content now
Meanwhile, society has turned both cases into content. The Clancy jurors are television characters. A holdout juror's personal life has been ripped apart online. Patrick Clancy, who lost all three of his children, has had strangers accuse him of involvement in their deaths. People are apparently using the case as a fucking dating compatibility test.
And Pike gets AI videos. Fake Pike crying. Fake Pike begging. Fake Pike eating while she waits to die. Somebody gets clicks, engagement, and ad revenue. The victim's mother reportedly needed help getting to Tennessee to attend the execution, while strangers manufacture fake footage of the woman who murdered her daughter, because apparently even an execution needs content now.
Tell me again how all of this is about justice.
If it were really about victims, everybody would know Colleen Slemmer's name as easily as they know Christa Pike's. She would exist in the public imagination as a nineteen-year-old woman instead of the body at the beginning of somebody else's story.
We say we care about victims, but we are spectacularly good at turning victims into supporting characters. Then we choose teams. Pink shirt or no pink shirt. Mercy or punishment. Good mother or monster. Pick a side, pick a hashtag, pick a fucking jersey.
Both things are true
Colleen Slemmer deserved to live. Cora, Dawson, and Callan deserved to live. Christa Pike committed a horrific murder. Lindsay Clancy killed her children.
Mental illness can matter without erasing victims. Trauma can matter without becoming absolution. Accountability can exist without execution. Understanding someone is not the same thing as excusing them, and believing somebody did something monstrous does not require believing the state needs to kill them.
One case is still asking questions. The other came within an hour of the end of the countdown clock.
And maybe that is what I hate most about the death penalty. It doesn't just tell us what we think about the person being executed. It tells us what we are willing to become once our curiosity, empathy, and interest in understanding that person run out.
We build a room. We prepare a gurney. We write down a time. We call witnesses. We kill a human being.
Then we call ourselves the civilized ones.