In a Nashville death chamber, Tennessee is poised to execute Christa Pike, the state’s only female death-row prisoner, for the 1995 torture and murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. For Colleen’s mother, who once watched her daughter’s broken skull passed around a courtroom, the looming execution feels less like closure than a brutal, necessary ending. She plans to sit front row, insisting Pike deserves no special treatment, no gentle accommodations that Colleen never had.

Pike’s attorneys paint a different picture: a girl raped, abused, and discarded by every system meant to protect her, left with bipolar disorder, PTSD, and no meaningful mental-health evaluation before being sentenced to die. Her plea to be hanged, or at least handled only by women, is less about spectacle than control over a final, terrifying memory. Between a grieving family demanding justice and a broken woman facing a needle she dreads, Tennessee now carries the unbearable weight of deciding whose suffering matters most.