Tangle - The failed execution of Christa Pike.

Episode Date: October 5, 2026

On Wednesday, Tennessee failed to execute Christa Pike after administering two doses of a lethal drug. Pike had been sentenced to death for her role in the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer, and she is now hospitalized in critical condition. Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee (R) canceled the state’s final scheduled execution of 2026 and accepted the resignation of Tennessee Department of Correction Commissioner Frank Strada. Ad-free podcasts are here!Get 20% off your first year of ad-free episodes, exclusive interviews, and deep dives with Tangle’s podcast membership!Is it a crisis?In Friday’s piece on the global fertility decline, Editor Audrey Moorehead wrote:The numbers vary from country to country, but consistent across the data is a simple fact: The fertility rate is in decline, both in the United States and around the world. To calibrate a response… three questions immediately arise: What does it actually mean that fertility is declining? Why is it in decline? And can — or should — we try to reverse it?You can read Audrey’s exploration of these questions — and what’s at stake if the decline continues — here.You can read today's podcast⁠ ⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠ and today’s “Have a nice day” story ⁠here⁠.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here.Take the survey: What do you think of the death penalty? Let us know. Our Executive Editor and Founder is Isaac Saul. Our Executive Producer is Jon Lall.This podcast written by: Isaac Saul and audio engineered and edited by Dewey Thomas. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Senior Editor Will Kaback, Bailey Saul, Audrey Moorehead, and Carina Pacheco. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle podcast, a place we get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of my take. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, officially ready to welcome fall with open arms. It's October 5th. The temperature dropped below 60 degrees in New Jersey this morning, and I just gleefully started my day. a cup of coffee, sitting in front of the fireplace, a little bit of NFL highlights. We get to enjoy the best two months of the year coming up, ladies and gentlemen. So breathe it in.

In the things I'm not willing to accept genre today, we are turning to the botched execution of Chris the Pike in Tennessee. I have strong feelings and I will do my best to argue them with some intellectual honesty and we've also got a dissenting view. Plus, a shout out to Audrey Morehead for her thought-provoking Friday edition on the fertility crisis, and it is Audrey, who is joining me on the show today to co-host a bit. So I'm going to pass over to her for today's main topic. I'll be back for my take. Thanks, Isaac. First up, we have today's quick hits. Number one, the U.S. military removed all 12 of its B-1 bomber aircraft from the United Kingdom's R.A.F. Fairford Air Base, reportedly due to unspecified security concerns. Number two,

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that non-farm payrolls increased 29,000 in September, and the unemployment rate slightly increased to 4.2%. The August and July non-farm jobs totals were both revised lower. Number three, Yemeni and Saudi forces launched a counteroffensive against Iran-backed Huthi rebels, seeking to regain control over the Bab al-Almandeb Strait. Number four, a researcher in southeastern Siberia died after contracting a suspected case of the mnemonic plague. The State Department asked Russia to share information about the incident. Number five, right-wing candidate Flavio Bolsonaro, and left-wing president Louise Inaccio-Lula

de Silva advanced to a runoff in Brazil's presidential election. Krista Pike, a woman on death row in Tennessee, survived two doses of a lethal injection intended to execute her. But the drug used in the failed execution has a controversial past. Pento-barbitol is a sedative that depresses the central nervously. But critics of its use in lethal injections say that it can lead to a build-up of fluid in the lungs and create a feeling of suffocation. On Wednesday, Tennessee failed to execute Krista Pike after administering two doses of a lethal drug. Pike had been sentenced to death for her role in the 1995 murder of Colleen Slimmer,

and she's now hospitalized in critical condition. Tennessee's Republican governor, Bill Lee, canceled the state's final scheduled execution of 2026 and accepted the resignation of Tennessee Department of Corrections Commission. Frank Strata. For more context, in 1995, Pike and her boyfriend lured Slemer into the woods and attacked her, eventually bludgeoning her to death. The crime drew national attention due to the extent of Slemer's wounds and investigator's suggestion that the killing was tied to the occult. Court documents said that Pike viewed Slemer as a romantic rival. Pike confessed to the murder and was sentenced to death in 1996. Pike's lawyers appealed the sentence, arguing that

jurors may have decided differently had they been informed of physical and sexual abuse, Pike suffered as a child. The attorneys also asked the Supreme Court to halt last week's execution, saying it was likely to cause severe mental suffering and superadded psychological terror under Tennessee's lethal injection protocol. The Supreme Court denied the appeal. Tennessee's death penalty protocol is to administer five grams of pentobarbital, a barbiturate that can depress breathing and circulatory function and lead to death. On Wednesday, according to witnesses, Pike complained of pain in her arm after prison officials administered an initial five-gram dose of pentobarbital. She was later given another dose and appeared to lose consciousness,

but continued breathing for another hour. Eventually, witnesses were asked to leave the facility, and Pike was taken to the hospital. In a Saturday statement, Department of Corrections Commissioner Strata maintained that the state followed all protocols in attempting to execute Pike, but said he will step down in the best interest of the state. Separately, Governor Lee ordered an independent investigation into the incident, which is Tennessee's second failed execution this year. Pike's attorneys criticized the state for its actions, saying it had been warned ahead of time that it was not prepared to carry out the execution. They said, quote, the concerns raised by Ms. Pike proved to be true. Difficult vein access, blown veins, degraded pentobarbital, no emergency medical

care available when things inevitably go wrong, all under a protocol that remains veiled in secrecy, end quote. Next up, you'll hear views from the left and the right on the failed execution and the debate over the death penalty in the United States. Then you'll hear executive editor Isaac Saul's take. We'll be right back after this quick break. First up, what the left is saying. Many on the left say the failed execution highlights longstanding issues with the death penalty. Some note Tennessee's multiple failed executions this year. Others argued the death penalty is immoral. In Salon, Austin-Sarrot wrote,

Krista Pike's Bosch's Boch's execution was not an isolated incident. Such problems have occurred many other times, though generally they have not prevented executions from proceeding. The people tasked for the job of finding a usable vein and securing an IV are not phlebotomists with specialized training or nurses. In states like Tennessee, which does not carry out many lethal injection executions, members of the execution team do not have the chance to perfect their skill by using it a lot. According to American Medical Association guidelines, doctors involved in lethal injections cannot

choose injection sites, start IV lines to administer the lethal medicine, or be involved in prescribing, preparing, administering, or supervising injection drugs or their doses or types. The result is that states have been forced to turn to unlicensed medical personnel. Hundreds of them have played a role in executions, but they have done so in the shadows. That is not good enough when someone's life is being extinguished. In the Tennessean, Takuma Roebuck argued Tennessee can't get executions right. Legal studies like this one have long called Tennessee's capital punishment protocols into question, particularly when it comes to legal representation for defendants and the state's administration of capital punishment.

Before Pike and before nine Tennessee lawmakers wrote Lee requesting a review of what went wrong in Caruthers' execution, there were similar concerns about lethal injection protocols raised by another independent review four years ago. that review was supposed to fix things. When the Tennessee legislature resumes in January, it should push for a full multi-year review of the TDOC and its death penalty protocol, including the method by which executions are administered. Given the demonstrated incompetence of how the death penalty is administered in this state, can we really trust that another review will result in substantive corrective change? In USA Today, Rex Hupke called the failed execution a moral stain on America.

Simply put, state and federal governments should not be in the business of killing people. Killing is messy, and things can go grotesquely wrong as they did in Pike's case. More important, though, killing is wrong. I shouldn't even have to type those words. And the state deciding who among convicted criminals lives

and who dies is morally obtuse. There is no evidence the death penalty acts as a deterrent, yet there have already been 29 prisoners executed in the United States since January. We still haven't reckoned with the fact that not wanting our government to kill criminals isn't the same as wanting a murderer to live. The murderer is the one who did wrong,

so what good comes from us doing wrong as well? I hope the horror of what happened to Pike at our hands shifts some thinking on the morality of the death penalty. Next up, what the right is saying. Many on the right suggest the case shows the U.S. should return to previous methods of carrying out the death penalty. Some argue that Pike's history of abuse

and mental health challenges should have ruled out a death sentence. Others criticize legal hurdles that complicate and prolong executions. In the Federalist, Hayden Daniels argued Christa Pike shows it's time to bring back firing squads. In contrast to Lee's limp-risted act to deny justice even further by halting further executions, gubernatorial candidate and current Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn said, This situation is tragic. Krista Pike should have been executed long ago.

The answer is simple. Bring back the electric chair and deliver justice for these victims, swiftly. Blackburn is exactly right. People who commit especially heinous crimes should be dealt with via the death penalty and dealt with both efficiently and quickly. The firing squad represents another execution method that we've nearly abandoned because of its supposed barbarity, yet it stands as the very definition of swift and efficient. Death by firing squad comes in less than a minute, while death from lethal injection can take up to two hours, or not at all, in Pike's case. Pikes shouldn't have sat on death row for decades, and her botched execution undermines the pursuit of true justice,

not only in her case, but in all cases going forward. In National Review, Catherine Jean Lopez wrote, The State as Executioner is a moral failure, and turns out to be a practical one, too. Pike was going to be the first woman executed in the state of Tennessee in over 200 years, and the first person in the modern era who was a teenager at the time of the offense, according to her clemency petition. This is barbaric. I don't believe there's a circumstance in the United States in this day and age that warrants the death penalty. Like with just war, I think there could be a moral case and time. Not this time. Life in prison will do just fine.

Even if you do not agree with me, we should not be executing people with brain damage and with severe mental illness or who were severely abused as children. Child abuse happens when adults fail children. When they directly inflict pain on them are indifferent to harm others are doing to them or when they have not adequately protected them. someone who has failed by the adults in her life from the beginning should not then be killed by the government. In the Washington Examiner, Zachary Faria described how legislatures in the courts sabotage the death penalty. State legislators in the courts have turned the death penalty into a grimly farcical process, feeding the cheapest arguments against it. In March 1996, Pike was sentenced to death. Yet Pike's execution was not allowed to take place for another 30 years, thanks to the quagmire of appeals meant to bog down the process. The legal chicanery continued all the way to her execution date,

when a federal appeals court momentarily halted the execution an hour before it was scheduled to take place. This case will then be used to argue that the death penalty should be abolished. It is more expensive than life imprisonment, you will hear, even though it is only more expensive because of the seemingly never-ending appeals that dragged the process out for decades. This legislative and judicial sabotage of the death penalty taints any debate about its merits, and it does so by denying justice.

to families like that of Slemmer. That's it for views from the left and the right. Now back to Isaac for his take. All right, that is it for the left and the righter saying, which brings us to my take. A hospital is trying to keep a woman alive so the Tennessee government can kill her. That's the dark, absurd situation

created by the widespread acceptance of a system that allows the government to take the lives of its own citizens. Longtime readers of Tangans, will know that my most extreme political position is that I'm anti-prisoned. I don't believe we should release all the criminals into the streets. In fact, I don't know of a better alternative for how to handle people who have proven themselves unfit for society. So for now, I accept that prisons are necessary. But I do know that locking a human being in an eight-by-eight-eight-foot cage is a form of justice feels incredibly bleak, counterproductive, and inhumane. It's a system that values punishment

over civil liberties in the name of public safety, and the blackest parts of the soul pushed to hand out that sort of punishment. So, unsurprisingly, I also oppose the death penalty. Here, my argument is much more straightforward and defensible because there is an alternative. Don't allow our government to kill prisoners. Rather than debate the merits of executing someone like Chris the Pike

or having arguments about whether someone who slit another person's throat is worthy of sympathy, I choose to draw a simple line in the sand. Killing people is immoral. There are reasons to cross that line in the sand. A police officer killing someone in the midst of a mass shooting or someone defending themselves or others from legitimate lethal threats. But we have laws and systems to navigate those exceptions. That's the principled argument against the death penalty.

Citizens don't get to kill other people so the justice system shouldn't get to kill citizens. The practical argument, as I've laid out before, is that the government has almost certainly executed innocent people, and it has come terrifyingly close to executing innocence hundreds of times before. It's so common that trying to free people wrongfully put on death row has become a cottage industry, and those appeals often succeed. How many government killings of innocent citizens are we willing to accept? The answer should be zero, but the only way to guarantee that is to end the practice. But if none of that is resonant, I have other practical arguments.

The government is evidently bad at killing people. The legal process costs us more money than keeping inmates alive, and the death penalty isn't actually a deterrent to heinous crime. So on top of the moral issue, it's also carried out against the wrong people in the wrong way and to no practical end. It really doesn't matter if you want to meet out the maximum punishment on a convicted criminal, or if you want to attempt to rehabilitate all the quote-unquote bad people. If you're in the former camp, keeping someone alive in a prison is both cheaper for citizens

and I'd argue a harsher punishment than death. If you're in the latter camp, the death penalty precludes any opportunity to rehabilitate someone. It is just the final step in a cycle of violence that only reinforces the idea that killing is a reasonable way to solve problems. Arguments like those from Hayden Daniel under what the right is saying that we could solve all this by bringing back the electric chair or firing squads might be convincing if the only goal is to kill people more effectively than lethal injections. Yet nearly 2% of all electric chair executions are botched,

and since its inception, it's been one of the most gruesome tools for killing someone. Firing squads have a better track record of working, quote-unquote, though they typically depend on trying to shoot the convicted's heart the target the shooters are known to miss. In reality, there's no such thing as a guaranteed and humane execution, even when they work as intended, they are gruesome. A long line of people have supported the death penalty until they've witnessed an execution, including by lethal injection, mostly because the notion that people just doze off and pass into another dimension at the command of the state is a complete farce.

Executions have been going wrong since hangings and stonings, and they'll continue to be botched into the future. Krista Pikes wasn't even the first botched execution this year. It wasn't even the first botched execution in Tennessee this year. It wasn't even the first botched execution by this same doctor in Tennessee this year. A little bit of small government libertarianism is all you actually need to oppose the death penalty. If you don't trust the government to fix a pothole in your neighborhood, why do you think incompetently take the lives of human beings? None of this requires any sympathy for Krista Pike.

Her victim, Colleen Slemmer, would have just turned 51. Slemer's mother, Mae Martinez, remembers her daughter as a generous and kind person. who volunteered at the Special Olympics, loved bowling and roller skating, and wanted to pursue a career in computers. Pike tortured her, then murdered her, then bragged about it later that night, telling someone she had cut the victim's throat six times,

beaten her and thrown asphalt at the victim's head. Pike relayed that Slemmer had begged her to stop, but she kept going because the victim continued to talk. She brought a piece of her skull to breakfast the next morning as a souvenir. Martinez is still alive, witnessing the events of the last few weeks 31 years after her daughter's murder, trying to get justice. Again, nobody needs to have any sympathy for Pike.

But not incidentally, I could easily argue that she was a bad candidate for the death penalty. On the moral spectrum of convicted killers, even those who committed gruesome murders, Pike is more sympathetic than most. She's been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She likely suffered brain damage in the womb. Some evidence shows she was sexually and physically abused. and she was 18 years old at the time she committed the heinous murder barely an adult. Her boyfriend, an accomplice, was 17 and thus spared the death penalty.

But I shouldn't even have to make that argument. The real discussion we should be having is not whether a mentally disabled killer needs to be kept alive in a hospital so the government can kill her. We should be talking about the death penalty itself, and the guaranteed preposterousness of situations like this that are all downstream of us accepting that the government can sometimes kill it. citizens. We should end this uncivilized and moral practice and find other ways to solve our problems. All right, that is it for my take. And now back to Audrey, who is both hosting the pod and also has

a dissent today. Thanks, Isaac. This is editor Audrey Moorhead. Back with a staff dissent on behalf of myself and associate editor Karina Pacheco. We agree that Tennessee's botched execution attempt of Krista Pike is a horrible outcome. that we take different lessons from it than Isaac does. Tennessee's repeated failures with lethal injections should push us to re-examine how and when we implement the death penalty rather than discard the practice altogether. Capital punishment does not need to deter crime or rehabilitate offenders to have merit.

Plainly, it should serve justice. Some crimes are so grave that state-sanctioned death is the only proportionate response. Many capital punishment defenders, us among them, agree that the modern process is too costly, drawn out, and unfairly applied, and therefore far more dysfunctional and cruel than it needs to be. Similar to the values of a speedy trial and an aversion to cruel unusual punishment, the death penalty ought to be swiftly implemented in a foolproof manner, reserved for the worst of the worst criminal offenses. Much of the anti-death penalty argument rests on the fact that innocent people reside on death row, but that is a different issue worthy of far deeper

probing. The law already requires certainty to convict, and we must meet that existing standard before approaching the death penalty question. At the same time, we should reserve punishment for a narrow, heinous set of crimes, such as mass shootings and serial or mass murder. This latest example in a string of failed executions is a prime opportunity to re-evaluate how the death penalty is implemented to maximally serve justice when it's due. We'll be right back after this quick break. Finally, we have our Have a Nice Day story.

Scientists long believed that Gen 2 penguins were a single species, but new genetic evidence has pinpointed four separate species among them, including the recently identified southeastern Gentoo penguin. These penguins live on the Kurgulian islands in the Indian Ocean, located approximately 2,000 miles from the nearest permanently inhabited landmass. Genetic markers and slight variations in body size and vocalizations distinguish them from other gentus, and they are the first new penguin species discovered in more than 100 years. Science Daily has the story, and you can find the link in the show notes.

That's at Bridgetay's podcast. If you would like to support our work, head over to reetangle.com, where you can buy a newsletter subscription, a podcast subscription, or a bundle membership that gets you a discount on both. We will be right back here tomorrow, but in the meantime, this has been editor Audrey Moorhead. On behalf of Isaac and everyone else, have a great day and peace.

Our executive editor and founder is me, Isaac Saul, and our executive producer is John Law. Today's episode was edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Our editorial staff is, by managing editor Ari Weitzman with senior editor Will Kayback and associate editors, Audrey Moorhead, Bailey Saul. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. To learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our website at reetangle.com.