Vishvapani, a member of the Triratna Buddhist Order - 14/10/2026

In 1995 Christa Pike, then eighteen, brutally murdered Colleen Slemmer, and was sentenced to death. Two weeks ago, the State of Tennessee tried to carry out that sentence, but the attempt failed and Pike survived. Less reported is that in recent years she'd become a Buddhist.
For decades Colleen Slemmer’s mother has looked to the execution for justice, and for a sense, however stark, that a debt had been paid. Pike’s survival, through grotesque chance, denied her that.
Meanwhile Pike herself reportedly practised loving-kindness meditation in the execution chamber. And reportedly, the words she thought would be her last were “I’m going to leave this world… with love.” Not an apology, but she followed then she said “May you be at peace. May you be kind and gentle to yourself.”
This strange, terrible story sets me in mind of men and women I’ve met teaching mindfulness in prisons and on probation, including some serving life sentences. Some of these, though certainly not all, had a remarkable self-awareness and maturity, learned, I presume, through years of confinement. Time inside had confronted them with themselves, and what they’d done. And sometimes mindfulness helped them stay in touch with that.
I can’t vouch for Pike’s state of mind or her remorse. But it’s possible she’d learned something similar. Buddhism treats killing as among the gravest acts, because it denies another person’s humanity and imposes our will in the most brutal way. Yet life can’t be controlled like that. People aren’t objects, and the consequences of our actions keep rippling outwards, returning to us as anger, grief and shame. That’s why, from a Buddhist perspective, the hope that a death can bring things to a close is so hard to realise.
Life is always changing, always in process, and so are we. Our past actions, even something as terrible as murder, must be faced squarely. But they don’t wholly define us.
Pike’s survival means the questions remain open. Tennessee must decide what to do with her. But we can also ask: who, exactly, was in that chamber? The teenager who killed, or the woman of fifty wishing peace on her witnesses? Buddhism insists we can’t answer that by settling accounts.
Perhaps the best response is compassion: for Christa Pike; for those who carried out the sentence; for Colleen Slemmer, killed at nineteen; for her family, who are still grieving. In the words recited in the loving kindness practice: “May you be at peace.”