Christa Pike, 50, was rushed to a Nashville hospital after surviving two doses of pentobarbital intended to kill her for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, committed when Pike was 18. She is alive and recovering in a hospital after surviving a failed execution attempt in Tennessee on September 30, 2026. She regained consciousness and is able to speak.
She would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in two centuries. Governor Lee called the outcome “deeply disturbing,” ordered an independent review, and halted executions for the rest of the year………
The Lambeth Conferences of 1988 and 1998 opposed it (the death penalty), and the Episcopal Church has opposed it since 1958. ACNA has no settled position as far as I know, and its evangelical wing generally leans the Genesis 9 way.
There is also a middle position, held by figures like Oliver O’Donovan: the state may execute, but in modern conditions it should not, because of fallible courts, unequal application, and, as Tennessee now shows, the inability to do it without torture.
But here is where American practice collides most directly with the biblical standard.
Read David Virtue here