“A pound of flesh” for a piece of skull

When she was 18, Christa Pike taunted and beat 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, eventually slashing her throat and body with a box cutter. Pike and an accomplice carved pentagrams into Slemmer’s body and when she still didn’t die, Pike picked up a large piece of asphalt and bashed Slemmer in the head with it repeatedly causing a fatal fracture. Pike then took a piece of Slemmer’s skull as a trophy—showing it to other people and bragging about the crime—until she was arrested, when the skull fragment was recovered by police in Pike’s jacket pocket and held onto by the state as evidence.

Bafflingly, though they could have taken photos and made a mold as Slemmer’s mother said years ago so the piece of skull could be buried with the rest of her daughter’s body, Tennessee officials have refused to give it to Slemmer’s mother until after Pike is executed on September 30. Their position: “a pound of flesh” for a piece of skull.

Recoiling from the savage details of Pike’s crime is a normal, human response. Wanting Pike to stay in jail for the rest of her life is also a normal, human reaction. What’s abnormal and inhuman is Tennessee’s insistence on exacting “a pound of flesh” from Pike—by executing her via lethal injection—for killing Slemmer.

The phrase a “pound of flesh” comes from Shakespeare. In his play, “The Merchant of Venice,” a moneylender demands a literal pound of flesh from a merchant for not repaying a loan. Grammarist.com tells us nowadays, “The expression a pound of flesh describes a ruthless or unreasonable demand often made at great personal cost or suffering to the person expected to fulfill it.”

To be clear, I’m not arguing in this essay about the great personal cost or suffering Pike is scheduled to face when, after spending 27 years in solitary confinement, she’s the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years. I’m also not arguing here about pentobarbital, the drug Tennessee intends to execute Pike with that has repeatedly been shown to be torturous. Nor am I right now arguing about the unqualified personnel who’ve said they will be involved in executing Pike—like the doctor who botched the recent bloody, painful execution attempt of Tony Carruthers. Nor am I excusing Pike any by noting that her jury never heard about her mental illness, brain damage, and history of rape and abuse.

I’m also not writing this to criticize Slemmer’s mother who wants Pike to be executed, or any victim of homicide militating for capital punishment. Because while crime victims have input in laws—including those involving the death penalty—and I’m not arguing that they shouldn’t, laws are ultimately enacted by legislators who are elected by a majority of the people; this includes, I hope, people who are sober, reasonable, and God-fearing. People who have not understandably had their reasoning personally hijacked by having to deal with the murder of a loved one. I’m criticizing the existence of capital punishment itself.

Because just as famed defense attorney Clarence Darrow said over 100 years ago to the court in his sentencing plea for infamous child-killers Leopold and Loeb, “I admit right off that I hate killing, and I hate it no matter how it is done. Whether you shoot a man through the heart, or cut his head off with an ax, or kill him with a chisel, or tie a rope around his neck. I hate it. I always did. I always shall.”

Like Darrow, I want to ask, “Where is the human heart that would not be satisfied with [a sentence of life without parole]?” And “Where is the man or woman who understands their own life and who has a particle of feeling that could ask for more?” Because as Darrow argued, “[a]ny cry for more roots back to the hyena; it roots back to the hissing serpent; it roots back to the beast from whence we came.”

About the blood-thirsty zeal for a death sentence over life in prison without parole, Darrow said further: “I can’t understand it…. It would be past belief, excepting that to the four corners of the earth the news of this weird thing has been carried, and men have been stirred, and the primitive has come back, and the intellect has been destroyed, and men have been controlled by feelings and passions and hatred which should have been dead centuries ago.”

But here we are, more than a century after Darrow uttered those fine words, and still Satan’s serpent hisses and the mangy hyena slinks around baring its sharp teeth. The great personal cost and suffering, while first felt by Pike, will eventually be felt by all Tennesseans and all good people across the country that abhor killing.

Darrow was resolute that, “Someday, someday if there is any spirit of humanity that is working in the hearts of men, some day they will look back upon this as a barbarous age which deliberately turned the hands of the clock backward, which deliberately set itself in the way of all progress toward humanity and sympathy, and committed an unforgivable act.” And that’s how it will be if Pike’s execution goes forward following many millions of dollars in litigation costs—money which could have been used to improve the lives of Tennesseans by funding better schools and hospitals.

Inevitably, the death penalty will someday be abolished even if Pike is executed. Indeed, her execution might even help seed the “deep well of sympathy” Darrow was sure “still flows forth in the human breast” without which “there would be no life on this weary old planet. [For] gradually the laws have been changed and modified, and men [and women will] look back with horror at the hangings and [executions] of the past”—including Pike’s. Maximum security prisons obviate the “need” to exact a pound of flesh from those people who kill other people.

Darrow was adamant, and I share his adamancy, when he declared: “I know that every step in the progress of the world in reference to crime has come from the human feelings of man.” Bill Lee, Tennessee’s governor, could advance this progress by commuting Pike’s sentence to life without parole. But whether Lee does or doesn’t spare Pike, good God-fearing Tennesseans—and all other Americans, too—have to work harder to abolish the death penalty. They have to speak out about this just cause with the same fervor and commitment as Clarence Darrow and only elect politicians who promise they will endeavor to end capital punishment.