By Aaron Miller-
The U.S judicial system’s observance of the rule of law is under continued scrutiny in the case of Christa Pike, after it came to light that the system did not observe the evidence before the plan and agreement to order an execution against a teenager who had been sexually abused multiple times as a baby and very young child. A five way phone conference had to be arranged to discuss and debate the importance and usefulness of this publication taking a stand in this case, once brought to the attention of those at the helm of The Eye of Media
A pertinent question is what the rule of law requires when serious evidence about a defendant’s childhood, abuse and developmental circumstances was not fully brought before the original sentencing process. Pike is scheduled to be executed in Tennessee on September 30, 2026, for the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer, a crime committed when Pike was 18. Her lawyers have asked Governor Bill Lee to commute her death sentence to life imprisonment without parole, arguing that her conduct cannot properly be separated from a childhood marked by repeated rape, sexual abuse, violence and neglect and from the failures of the adults and institutions that were supposed to protect her.
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The State does not dispute the basic history of abuse. Indeed, during the recent proceedings concerning Pike’s execution, Tennessee Attorney General’s Office lawyer Will Ayers acknowledged the profound suffering she had experienced, telling the court that everyone wished those events had never happened and that Pike was not on death row. That acknowledgement makes the question of the rule of law more difficult, not less. The issue is no longer whether there is evidence that Pike suffered an extraordinarily abusive childhood. There is extensive evidence of it, and her current legal team has placed that material before the Governor in a 226-page clemency petition. The issue is whether the American justice system has provided a meaningful mechanism for that evidence to be fully examined in determining whether the ultimate punishment should still be imposed.
The phrase “rule of law” is frequently associated with respect for court judgements, legal procedures and the finality of criminal convictions. Those principles are essential to any functioning justice system. But the rule of law is not merely a command to obey whatever decision was made decades earlier. A justice system governed by law must also ask whether its procedures were capable of revealing the material facts necessary to make a fair and informed decision in the first place, particularly where the punishment is irreversible.
That is where Pike’s case presents an uncomfortable challenge. Her lawyers maintain that the jury that sentenced her to death did not hear the full extent of the sexual abuse and trauma she experienced as a child, nor the consequences that those experiences had upon her development and behaviour. Amnesty International has similarly reported that Pike’s court-appointed lawyers presented little of the mitigating evidence concerning her abuse and its psychological consequences
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If that account is correct, the question for a society committed to the rule of law is not simply whether Pike was convicted according to the rules that existed in 1995 and 1996. The question is whether those rules, as applied in her particular case, produced a sentencing decision that took account of all the circumstances that ought to have been considered before a human being was condemned to death. The Tennessee Supreme Court recently appointed Senior Judge W. Mark Ward as a special master to examine Pike’s challenges to the State’s proposed method of execution. The proceedings considered issues including the risks associated with intravenous access, her medical condition, the psychological consequences of transferring her to the execution facility and the possibility of severe suffering during lethal. Those are serious constitutional questions.
But they are not the same question as whether the State should execute Pike in the first place. The judicial process is therefore confronted with an extraordinary paradox. The courts are being asked to determine whether Tennessee may lawfully execute Pike, while the executive clemency process is simultaneously being asked whether Tennessee should execute her at all. The evidence concerning Pike’s childhood may be profoundly relevant to the second question even where the courts do not treat it as sufficient grounds to overturn the original conviction or sentence. That is precisely why clemency exists. Tennessee’s constitutional framework gives the Governor the authority to grant reprieves and pardons, while state law recognises the power of commutation. The Governor’s exercise of that authority is not an act outside the law; it is an authority created by law.
This is the question that should trouble anyone who takes the rule of law seriously.And suppose, three decades later, the State is preparing to execute her while acknowledging that the abuse occurred. At what point does the legal system have an obligation to stop and ask whether the original process captured enough of the truth to justify an irreversible punishment?
The answer cannot simply be that the jury has already spoken. The American legal system contains appeals, post-conviction proceedings and executive clemency precisely because the law recognises that a criminal case does not necessarily end every form of legal consideration when the original judgement is entered. The existence of clemency is itself an admission that justice may require something more than mechanical adherence to the sentence originally imposed.
The judiciary’s responsibility is not exhausted by procedure
It would be wrong to suggest that the courts have done nothing in Pike’s case.They have considered constitutional challenges to her execution protocol, and a special master was appointed to conduct an evidentiary hearing. The Tennessee courts have therefore engaged with substantial legal questions surrounding the proposed execution.
However, legal experts acknowledge that this does not answer the larger question. The rule of law is concerned not only with whether judges have followed prescribed procedures, but with whether the legal system provides meaningful protection for fundamental rights and permits material claims to receive genuine consideration. That question becomes especially serious when the consequence is death. A recent filing in the U.S. Supreme Court involving another Tennessee death-row prisoner has itself invoked the constitutional principle that prisoners must have adequate, effective and meaningful access to the courts when challenging constitutional violations.
The principle is important because access to a legal process is not meaningful merely because a person is technically permitted to file papers. The deeper question is whether the system is capable of hearing and addressing the substance of the claim. There is another dimension to Pike’s case that the rule of law cannot comfortably ignore. The murder of Colleen Slemmer was real. The suffering of Slemmer and her family is real. Accountability for a homicide is a legitimate function of criminal justice.But recognising the responsibility of an offender does not require the State to disregard the circumstances that produced the offender.
Pike’s clemency petition does not deny her responsibility for Slemmer’s death. Rather, it argues that the punishment should be reconsidered in light of Pike’s age, her history of abuse, the failures of the systems that encountered her during childhood, her subsequent decades in prison and the mitigating evidence that her lawyers say was not adequately presented when she was sentenced. That is not an argument that victims should receive less justice. It is an argument that justice should distinguish between acknowledging responsibility for a terrible crime and determining whether the person who committed it should be killed by the State three decades later.
Perhaps the most important issue for the rule of law is therefore not whether Pike deserves sympathy. It is whether the institutions of justice knew enough about her childhood when the death sentence was imposed. If evidence of severe childhood abuse existed but was not properly investigated, presented or considered, then the integrity of the original sentencing decision deserves serious scrutiny. If the evidence was known but the law did not permit it to have the significance that Pike’s lawyers now argue it should have had, then the question becomes whether the executive clemency process should now provide the corrective mechanism.
And if the evidence is being acknowledged but the State is nevertheless moving inexorably towards execution without a meaningful reconsideration of its significance, then the public is entitled to ask whether the machinery of justice has become more concerned with preserving the finality of an old decision than with ensuring that the decision remains justifiable in light of what is now known. That is not an allegation that the courts have acted unlawfully. It is a question about what the rule of law should demand from a justice system confronting an irreversible punishment.
The Governor’s role does not diminish the judiciary — it completes the legal framework
This is why the focus must ultimately turn to Governor Lee. The Governor is not being asked to declare Pike innocent. He is not being asked to replace the jury. He is not being asked to conduct another criminal trial. He is being asked to exercise a power that Tennessee law deliberately places in the executive branch: the power to commute a criminal sentence.
Governor Lee has already demonstrated that executive clemency remains an active component of Tennessee’s legal system. On August 27, his office announced clemency decisions involving 34 individuals and stated that cases not included in that announcement remained eligible for future consideration. Pike’s case therefore raises a question that goes directly to the relationship between the judiciary and executive clemency. When the courts have reached the limits of what they are prepared to reconsider, does the rule of law require the executive to examine what the judicial process may not have fully addressed? That is the question The Eye of Media believes deserves to be placed before Governor Lee. The United States presents itself as a nation governed by constitutional law, judicial independence and due process.
Those principles are not tested only when an accused person is brought before a court. They are tested most severely when the State is about to take a human life. In Pike’s case, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has urged the United States to refrain from carrying out the execution, while international experts have raised concerns about her history of abuse and the circumstances surrounding her proposed execution. Amnesty International has likewise called on Governor Lee to stop the execution and grant clemency. These interventions do not determine what Tennessee law requires, and they do not replace the authority of American courts. But they reinforce the central question: has every meaningful safeguard been exhausted before an irreversible punishment is carried out? That is the question that the rule of law should force us to confront.
It is a test of whether a justice system can acknowledge that new understanding, overlooked evidence and human circumstances matter even after a courtroom door has closed; whether the law has mechanisms capable of correcting the consequences of an incomplete picture; and whether those mechanisms are actually being used before the State crosses a line from which there can be no return. The ultimate issue is not whether the rule of law should protect the authority of the courts. It unquestionably should. The deeper issue is whether protecting the rule of law also requires the justice system to ensure that procedure does not become a substitute for justice, finality does not become a substitute for truth, and an old sentence does not become irreversible merely because the system has become accustomed to treating it as final.
The question before Tennessee is therefore no longer merely what the courts have already decided. It is whether, before the State takes a life, the rule of law permits — and perhaps demands — that the system look once more at the evidence of the childhood that preceded the crime, the failures that surrounded it, the mitigation that may not have been heard, and the punishment that is now about to become irreversible.If the rule of law cannot accommodate that examination, the public is entitled to ask what, precisely, the rule of law is protecting.
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