“It was a mess.” That’s how May Martinez described the failed execution of her daughter’s murderer, Christa Pike. When the first lethal injection failed to kill Pike on September 29th, she was left writhing in pain before an audience of journalists and family members. The executioners administered a second dose to no effect. As Pike screamed and kicked, the death chamber curtains closed, and the spectators were rushed out without explanation. Currently, Christa Pike is alive and delirious in a Tennessee hospital. A court ordered state officials to preserve syringes and other evidence from the execution, which will certainly be used in forthcoming lawsuits against the state for violating Pike’s 8th Amendment rights. Next come the impossible questions about what happens to the condemned now. Protracted legal fights deciding Pike’s life are certain.
If anything, May Martinez’s thought was an understatement. “A mess” only scratches the surface of this cataclysmic clusterfuck, which extends far beyond the mayhem of the Tennessee execution chamber.
On March 30th, 1996, Christa Pike was convicted of murder in the first degree and conspiracy to commit murder. The victim was Colleen Slemmer, a fellow college student whom Pike and co-conspirators lured into the woods, tortured, and killed during a Satanic ritual. With the ghastly details of the crime in headline news and the Satanic Panic dominating the day, Pike was sentenced to death by electrocution, making her the first woman to be condemned by Tennessee in over two hundred years.
After thirty years of failed appeals, Pike’s lawyers succeeded in getting the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals to issue a “short” stay of execution an hour before the procedure was to start. Pike’s legal team argued the sexual abuse she suffered as a child greatly altered her cognition at the time of the murder (Pike was only eighteen). As that topic had been omitted from her 1996 trial, and scientific research on the matter has improved greatly over the last three decades, the 6th Circuit paused the execution until it could “properly analyze the parties’ fully briefed arguments and resolve the issues on the merits.” Never one to let silly things like “proper analysis” and “legal merits” get in the way of a good killing, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority granted Tennessee’s request to vacate the stay. An unexplained decision signed by who-else-but Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh gave Tennessee the go-ahead to proceed. As a result, the federal and Tennessee governments tortured a citizen, yet another display of American savagery for the world to witness.
This wasn’t Brett Kavanaugh’s first foray into legal fuckup. In the September 2025 case, Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, Kavanaugh legalized racial and class profiling by empowering ICE agents to stop and detain suspected undocumented immigrants based on:
“[Factors such as (i) presence at particular locations such as bus stops, car washes, day laborer pickup sites, agricultural sites, and the like; (ii) the type of work one does; (iii) speaking Spanish or speaking English with an accent; and (iv) apparent race or ethnicity].”
Kavanaugh didn’t introduce bias into American law enforcement. ICE and other police forces have been racially profiling long before 2025. But he did codify racial stops as constitutional. Legally empowered to conduct “Kavanaugh Stops,” ICE agents increased their terrorization of Hispanic, immigrant, and Chicano communities, as well as anyone who stood beside them. A new report from ProPublica details ICE’s brutal detainment of over five hundred American citizens who were “suspected” of being undocumented because of their ethnicity, race, or use of the Spanish language. When pressed on this unconstitutionality, the Department of Homeland Security cites Brett Kavanaugh’s Noem ruling as justification. DHS is evil, but not wrong. With Kavanaugh’s approval, the Supreme Court established that any ICE agent can ignore the 1st, 4th, 5th, 8th, and 14th Amendments if they suspect someone has an “illegal” vibe. While this report is new, the impact of Kavanaugh’s decision was immediate. The blowback was so fierce that Kavanaugh tried to walk back his legalization of racism just two months later in Trump v. Illinois. In a footnote, Kavanaugh wrote:
“The basic constitutional rules governing that dispute are longstanding and clear: The Fourth Amendment requires that immigration stops must be based on reasonable suspicion of illegal presence, stops must be brief, arrests must be based on probable cause, and officers must not employ excessive force. Moreover, the officers must not make interior immigration stops or arrests based on race or ethnicity.”
Kavanaugh and his fellow conservatives achieved the state suppression they sought, and left a paper trail distancing themselves from the real-world horror they inflicted upon the United States. Folks, this is the essence of American conservatism’s legal intelligentsia. An accussed-rapist decides Daddy President’s private blackshirts can do racist terrorism. Then when these blackshirts do exactly what everyone knew they would, the aforementioned alleged rapist reverses his decision in a footnote so future court historians will say he had a ‘complicated’ relationship with racism rather than describing him as the outright knuckle-dragging mongrel that he is.
I’m not surprised Kavanaugh’s name is the only one on this decision. If you had told me in 2018 during Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation process that he would spend his career codifying white nationalism and fast-tracking the torture of a prisoner, but doing it in the most cowardly, craven way possible, I would have absolutely believed you. For those unhaunted by the memory, Brett Kavanaugh was credibly accused of sexual assault by Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford during his confirmation hearing. Coming at the height of the #MeToo movement, some Republicans were uneasy about voting for him. Eager to show his fellow conservatives that he was also a grade-A scumbag, Kavanaugh debased himself to previously unseen depths by yelling “I like beer” at Senators, like a 19th-century anti-Irish immigration cartoon come to life. Then Senator Ben Sasse even worked up his alligator tears for an infamous floor speech in which he praised the #MeToo movement, denounced Trump for criticizing Kavanaugh’s accuser, said Kavanaugh was innocent, mentioned he has daughters, stated he didn’t want Kavanaugh to be appointed in the first place, spoke out against the epidemic of sexual assault, claimed the right was as committed to combating sexual assault as the left, and then voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh. Now that he has been diagnosed with terminal cancer, Sasse is using his final days not to reconcile for his mistakes, but to lecture Americans to stop playing Candy Crush and increase the birth rate. Yeah, man, the App Store isn’t why Americans are having fewer children. It’s because lack of healthcare access and high cost of living make families prohibitively expensive. Perhaps you should’ve considered that during your time in the most powerful legislative body in the world.
Like the process that got him onto the court, Brett Kavanaugh is not the only one at fault for torturing Christa Pike. In all likelihood, the conservative justices agreed to allow the execution, but forced Kavanaugh to sign his name because he’s the lowest on their pecking order. Yet, as Kavanaugh the man is the manifestation of the Court’s ideological capture and disregard for established law or basic decency, he is also an opportunity to challenge it. Both Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch said under oath that they wouldn’t overturn Roe v. Wade. Then, they both voted to overturn Roe v. Wade — a clear lie under oath, and one of many impeachable offenses the pair have committed. Given the severity of the Supreme Court’s disregard for the limits on its power, such as circumventing Congress to amend the Constitution to destroy established civil liberties on behalf of ICE, other proposed reforms are well worth consideration.
Appetite for materially altering the Court is strong. Even more conservative Democrats such as Adam Schiff and Joe Biden are on record supporting term limits and expanding the Court to thirteen justices to match the thirteen circuit courts in the United States. The most obvious need for Supreme Court reform is in its self-appointed ethics code, which has no mechanism for enforcement or punishment. The highest Court in the United States is rewriting the Constitution to match the Heritage Foundation website, and the only limitation on their behavior is a pinky promise that they’ll do it “ethically.” Meanwhile, the conservatives have turned the emergency docket (a.k.a. the “Shadow Docket”) into a fast track to anonymously approve whatever the White House wants. The Brennan Center for Justice found that the Court used the process to resolve cases in Trump's favor 75% of the time. Like Kavanaugh’s Noem ruling, many of these cases involve immigration and effectively erode all Americans’ civil liberties.
Brett Kavanaugh is the most visible and repugnant manifestation of the decaying corpse that is the Supreme Court. His confirmation was an embarrassment, and his tenure has been even worse. Kavanaugh illegally ended key Constitutional protections, and his latest work is stopping a judicial review so Tennessee could torture a woman — at least the second he’s personally victimized. With each passing day, Kavanaugh and his co-conspirators strip Americans of their rights under the false guise of legal proceedings and the rule of law.
Impeaching Brett Kavanaugh won’t solve all the issues with the Supreme Court. But it’s a good start that will remind everyone, citizens and justices alike, that the elite answer to the people. The elite are forgetful, so we'll need to remind them of their subservient status to the masses through a mass political program that directly challenges their power, including but not limited to the Supreme Court of the United States.
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In Solidarity — Joe
Kavanaugh needs some CBT. Not the psychology one.