One of Christa Pike’s swollen and blistered arms and both her feet were shackled as she lay in hospital after two doses of lethal injection in Tennessee that failed to have their intended effect. She is now walking with assistance and eating normally. The state may still follow through with the execution.

In The Irish Times, Keith Duggan has outlined her unrelentingly grim childhood. Born to an alcoholic mother, Pike has foetal alcohol syndrome, was neglected and brutally beaten in childhood, sexually abused from the age of two and subjected separately to at least three rapes by the age of 17. She attempted suicide aged 12 after the death of her grandmother, the only person Pike believed really loved her.

Nothing excuses the prolonged torture and death that Pike and Tadaryl Shipp, her abusive gang-member boyfriend at the time, inflicted on 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. But because Shipp was 17, just a year younger than Pike, he avoided the death penalty, and is now eligible for parole. Shadolla Peterson, who acted as lookout for Shipp and Pike, was given probation because she testified against them.

Pike was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in prison. Since being medicated, she has had no further history of perpetrating violence. She expressed remorse for the murder and became a Buddhist. According to her spiritual adviser, Rev Mikey Noechel, Pike went to her supposed execution practising metta, the Buddhist loving-kindness meditation. Other prisoners record her many small acts of kindness to them.

US president Donald Trump says it is........

© The Irish Times