On 30 September, the state of Tennessee plans to put Christa Pike to death, making her the third person sent to the death chamber in the Volunteer State this year - one of which was botched so badly it had to be stopped. If all goes according to plan, she'll join 17 others executed there since 1960, none of whom were women. In fact, across all US history, only 578 women have been executed, a little over 3% of the national total. The last was Amber McLaughlin, killed in Missouri in 2024.

On the surface, Pike's fate is unusual. But look closer, and it's a textbook case of America's broken death penalty system. Like many on death row, Pike had an unspeakably difficult childhood: raped, abused, abandoned, and neglected by her parents. So it's hardly surprising she turned to violence, committing a murder with two others when she was still a teenager. As psychologist Bethany Brand explains: "At 18 years old, her immature, traumatized brain made her exceptionally vulnerable to impulses and extremely poor decisions … Unmedicated and untreated, she was not able to put the 'brakes on' her bipolar- and trauma-triggered emotions."

At trial, her lawyer failed to present readily available mitigating evidence or uncover new circumstances. As professor Deborah Denno notes, counsel chose not to present social history evidence, claiming the materials contained "double-edged information" that might have helped or hurt her. Now, as she awaits execution, she has legitimate fears that, given her medical and emotional problems, the state's lethal injection will be a torturous, cruel death. Courts have so far looked the other way.

If they continue, Pike will join America's exclusive club of female execution victims - exclusive because while women commit about one in eight homicides, their crimes usually fall below the threshold of "worst of the worst" in prosecutors' eyes. As professor Elizabeth Rappaport argues: "Two thirds of women who kill, kill family members and lovers … [and] [t]hese crimes almost never result in death sentences, regardless of the sex of the killer."

Pike, however, wasn't one of those. Her victim was murdered gruesomely - prosecutors claim Pike "tortured and killed" her because she thought the victim was trying to steal her boyfriend. The brutality echoes Karla Faye Tucker's 1983 crime in Texas, where she and a co-defendant killed victims with a pickaxe. Tucker became a celebrity after a sincere religious conversion on death row, attracting national attention from televangelists including Pat Robertson, who appealed to Governor George W. Bush to commute her sentence. Bush refused, and Tucker was executed in 1998, the first woman in Texas since 1863.

Fast forward to January 2021, when the federal government under Donald Trump executed Lisa Montgomery. Her crime was also gruesome: in 2004, she crossed state lines ostensibly to buy a puppy from Bobbie Jo Stinnett, a 23-year-old pregnant dog breeder. Instead, she strangled her, cut the fetus from her womb, and tried to pass the baby off as her own. Like Pike, Montgomery "had brain damage and severe mental illness exacerbated by a lifetime of abuse, including child sex trafficking, gang rape, and physical abuse largely at the hands of family members." She was the fourth woman ever executed by the federal government, which hadn't put a woman to death since 1865, when it hanged Mary Surratt for her role in Lincoln's assassination. According to the National Museum of Women's History, "most people, including the military judges who issued the guilty verdict, could not believe the United States government was going to execute a woman."

There's a hint of that sentiment in coverage of Pike's case. Even as society pursues gender equality, something about executing a woman feels unsettling. But what should truly unsettle us isn't her gender - it's executing someone whose crime was as much society's failure as her criminal intent. For women and men alike, capital punishment offers no solution to the problems that spawn the worst crimes. Austin Sarat, associate dean and professor at Amherst College, author of Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America's Death Penalty, would likely agree.