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Quinn Delamater – TheWashingtonSTand
A Tennessee woman remains unconscious in the hospital since her failed execution on September 30. The botched attempt to end the life of death row inmate Christa Pike has captivated and confused the country. How should the state proceed? Is capital punishment ever justified?
In 1995, Pike and her boyfriend murdered classmate Colleen Slemmer. Pike, who was 18 at the time of the killing, was sentenced to the death penalty in 1996. Pike and her boyfriend murdered Slemmer by luring her to an abandoned steam plant at the University of Tennessee and brutally attacking her, slashing her with a box cutter, carving a pentagram into her chest, and smashing her skull. After the killing, Pike took a piece of Slemmer’s skull as a souvenir. According to Pike’s lawyers, she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and from being molested and raped as a child.
David Closson, who serves as director of the Center for Biblical Worldview at Family Research Council, says that Christians must turn to God’s word for clarity when considering capital punishment. “Christians need to begin with justice and asking what justice requires and what justice demands,” he explained during a Friday appearance on “Washington Watch.” “Genesis 9:6, I think, is the most important verse in this conversation: ‘Whoever sheds the blood of man by man shall his blood be shed for God made man in his own image.’…Christian ethicists have argued for centuries that the death penalty ultimately is grounded actually in the dignity of human life.”
Closson continued that murder is a grave offense, since every victim of it bears the image of God. “[In] Romans 13, another crucial passage, Paul writes that government is God’s servant and does not bear the sword in vain. Paul specifically describes the government as an avenger that carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer. Those words are incredibly important.”