Tennessee plans to execute Christa Pike on 30 September. She would be the third person sent to the death chamber in the state this year — one of those earlier attempts was halted after it was botched. She would also become the 18th person executed in Tennessee since 1960, and the first woman among them.

In all of U.S. history, only 578 women have been executed — a little more than 3 percent of the national total. The most recent was Amber McLaughlin, executed in Missouri in 2024. If Pike is put to death, it would be Tennessee’s first execution of a woman since 1819.

On the surface, that makes her case unusual. Look more closely, and it shows many of the familiar failings of America’s death-penalty system.

Like many people who end up on death row, Pike had a brutal childhood. She was raped and abused; when she was not being harmed, she was abandoned and neglected. She later turned to violence. At 18, still a teenager, she and two others committed a murder.

Psychologist and trauma expert Bethany Brand has argued that Pike’s immature, traumatized brain left her highly vulnerable to impulse and disastrous decisions. Unmedicated and untreated, she could not put the brakes on bipolar- and trauma-driven emotions.

At trial, her lawyer failed to present readily available mitigating evidence and did not develop new mitigation. Legal scholar Deborah Denno has noted that counsel chose not to introduce social-history evidence, claiming it contained “double-edged” information that might have hurt as well as helped.

Now, as she waits for execution, Pike has raised legitimate concerns that her medical and emotional conditions could make the state’s method of killing her torturous. Courts have so far declined to intervene.

If that continues, she will join a small group of women executed in the United States. The group is small in part because, although women commit about one in eight homicides, they more often commit killings that prosecutors, judges, and juries do not treat as the “worst of the worst.”

Elizabeth Rappaport has written that two-thirds of women who kill slay family members or lovers, and that those crimes almost never produce death sentences, regardless of the killer’s sex. Pike was not that kind of defendant. Her victim was killed in a gruesome way. Knoxville prosecutors have said she tortured and killed the victim because she believed the woman was trying to steal her boyfriend.

The brutality has been compared to Karla Faye Tucker’s 1983 Texas murders, committed with a pickaxe. Tucker later underwent a widely publicized religious conversion on death row. Evangelists, including Pat Robertson, asked Governor George W. Bush to commute her sentence. He refused. Tucker was executed in 1998 — the first woman put to death in Texas since 1863.

In January 2021, the federal government under Donald Trump executed Lisa Montgomery. Her crime was also exceptionally grim. In 2004 she crossed state lines, ostensibly to buy a puppy from Bobbie Jo Stinnett, a 23-year-old dog breeder who was eight months pregnant. Montgomery strangled her, cut the fetus from her womb, and tried to pass the surviving baby off as her own.

Like Pike, Montgomery had brain damage and severe mental illness, worsened by a lifetime of abuse that included child sex trafficking, gang rape, and physical violence, much of it by family members. She was killed by lethal injection — only the fourth woman ever executed by the federal government. The first was Mary Surratt, hanged in 1865 for her role in Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. At the time, many people, including some of the military judges who convicted her, could scarcely believe the government would execute a woman.

A trace of that unease still appears in coverage of Pike’s case. Even in a society that claims to pursue gender equality, the idea of putting a woman to death can feel unsettling.

What should be more unsettling is not her gender, but the prospect of executing someone whose crime was as much a product of social failure as of criminal intent. For women and men alike, capital punishment does not solve the conditions that produce the most serious crimes.

Austin Sarat is associate dean of the faculty and William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. He is the author of Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty.

Source: Theguardian