On May 2nd, 2000 Christina Marie Riggs was put to death by the lethal injection of the toxin potassium chloride. She was the first women put to death in Arkansas since the death penalty was reinstated nationally by the Supreme Court in the case Gregg v. Georgia in 1976.1 This statistic is misleading in scope, however, because Christina Marie Riggs is only the second known woman put to death by the State of Arkansas since it was incorporated in 1836. 2 Newspapers across the nation, and across the Atlantic took notice as only the 5th women in the United States was put to death in the post-Furman era.
While women are less frequently convicted of murder charges in the US, and in Arkansas specifically, than men,3 there are still 95 women in prison for first-degree murder, 4 and yet in none of these cases have prosecutors successfully pursued the death penalty in those convictions. What made Christina’s case unique?
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Christina Marie Thomas 5 was born on September 2nd, 1971 in the city of Lawton in South Western Oklahoma. By her own account—in a journal that she began in prison—her stepbrother began sexually abusing her at the age of seven. That sexual abuse continued until she was thirteen, when she also experienced sexual assault at the hands of near-by neighbor. To cope, and self-medicate the treatment of these traumas, she began drinking and smoking tobacco and marijuana. By the time she was fourteen, she describes in her journal that: “I felt that no boy liked me because of my weight, so I became sexually active. It was the only way I could have a boyfriend.” She got pregnant at the age of 16 and had to put the baby boy up for adoption. The year was 1988.
Christina finished high school in Lawton, Oklahoma and afterwards became a licensed nurse. According to those who knew her, she had turned her life around and had a full-time job working in a veteran’s administration hospital in Oklahoma City. Eventually she began dating an Air Force man, Timothy Thompson, stationed at Tinker Air Force Base. In 1991, she found out again that she was pregnant. When she told the father, the day before he was to be discharged from the Air Force, he denied that he was the father, and returned to his native state of Minnesota.
Christina then rekindled an old relationship with a sailor by the name of Jon Riggs while he was home in Oklahoma on leave. In her journal, she recorded, “It was great. He felt the baby’s first kick. As far as he was concerned, it was his baby.” Justin was born on June 7th, 1992. Jon moved in, and they formally became Mr. And Mrs. Riggs in July of 1993, with another baby already in the womb.
However, Christina, felt her relationship with Jon was troubled from the start, and when she miscarried on the wedding night, the relationship got even rockier. Jon and Christina’s marriage teetered on divorce while she became depressed and suicidal—a condition that Christina attributed to her prescription birth control—which she then stopped taking. Half a year later, in the spring of 1994, Christina Riggs became pregnant again, and in December of that year she gave birth to a daughter, Shelby Alexis. The family adopted nicknames for the children: “Bubbie” for Justin and “Sissie” for Shelby. It seemed like everything was going to be alright. In her journal, Christina described the scene in the Riggs household, “We were so happy. She was so beautiful. I didn’t think things could get any better. Jon cried. I cried. He was full of so much love for her. The way he looked at her.”
Then on April 19th, 1995, at 9:00 am a man parked a Ryder rental truck turned into a mobile fertilizer bomb in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal building. At 9:02 the truck exploded, killing at least 168 people and injuring many hundreds more. Riggs reports that she was assigned by her hospital to work at a triage station a short distance from the blast site. The stress and suffering of working under such intense conditions weighed heavily upon her, and she told her lawyers later that this experience led to the development of post-traumatic stress disorder. With increasing difficulties in her professional life and tension in the marriage, Jon and Christina decided to move to Sherwood, Arkansas to be closer to Christina’s mother, Carol Thomas, and hopefully receive more support from her family. Christina got a new job at a hospital in Little Rock where her mother was also employed, and the Riggs tried to leave the past behind them.
But the troubles of their marriage followed them across state borders—in the form of Jon’s abusive behavior and Christina’s worsening depression. The situation finally exploded when Jon punched Justin in the stomach so violently that the boy required medical attention. Christina left Jon and filed for divorce.
However, the financial troubles that caused the Riggs family to move to Arkansas in the first place got worse for Christina as she had to shoulder the cost of raising two children, and child-support from Jon became less and less frequent. Christina Riggs started bouncing checks, and she let the insurance and registration on her car expire. Despite working twelve-hour shifts at the hospital, she realized that she was not capable of keeping herself financially afloat. The stress of the finical situation, compiled with a history of abuse, depression and trauma, eventually led Christina to believe that suicide was her only option.
Court papers and trial testimony 6 tell us that on November 4th, 1997, Christina acquired the anti-depressant Elavil, the pain killer morphine, and the toxin potassium chloride from the Arkansas Heart Hospital where she worked. She returned to her home and at approximately 10 pm, she gave her two children doses of the Elavil mixed in water to make them drowsy. After the children had fallen asleep, Christina injected her son Justin with the toxin potassium chloride. Unfamiliar with the use of potassium chloride as a poison, she did not know that, used in executions, it is diluted with water to speed the toxin’s travel through the blood stream and prevent it from coagulating painfully in the veins before it reaches the heart.
Justin awoke screaming in pain. Christina immediately injected him with a dose of morphine to ease his screaming. When that did not work to quiet him down, she suffocated him with a pillow. According to Riggs, he fought back, but he was already in so much pain that she could not imagine leaving him alive.
After seeing how painful the potassium chloride was for her son, she skipped its usage again and decided to smother her daughter. Christina told the police later that Shelby only struggled “for a little bit.”
After murdering her two children, she moved their bodies to her bedroom where she placed the bodies together in her bed. She then proceeded to write suicide notes to her mother, her sister, and her former husband. Next, she took an excessive dosage of Elavil and injected herself with what she believed was enough potassium chloride to kill a human five times over. The quick onset of the drugs caused her to pass out on her bedroom floor. According to the best estimates of the forensic investigators, all of this had transpired by 10:30 p.m.
When Christina failed to show up for work the next day, Carol Thomas went to see why her daughter was not answering her phone. She let herself inside the house and found the children dead in the bed and Christina lying on the floor, unresponsive. Christina had a silver-dollar-sized chemical burn in her arm, where the undiluted potassium chloride had burned its way out of her vein, and Carol assumed that all three of them were dead. She called 911. All she could manage to tell the operator was, “My daughter and her babies are dead!” as she cried into the receiver.
When the paramedics arrived, they found Christina Riggs was still alive and transported her to a hospital where she was put in intensive care and placed under police supervision due to the syringes and suicide notes found on the scene. The following morning, she regained consciousness, although she was still heavily sedated under the influence of the overdose of Elavil she had taken the previous night. Her family requested to see her, but they were told that she was in no condition for visitors. At 9:20 am, with her mother and sister still denied access to Christina, two detectives were given permission to interview her on record, where they obtained a full, if muddled confession. Two minutes after the interview was concluded, Christina’s doctor found her unconscious in her bed, still suffering the effects of her overdose.
Despite the suspect manner in obtaining a confession (because she was under the influence, and because her family had already retained a lawyer and informed the police of that status, but were not permitted to speak with Christina before she was interviewed), this confession was the primary article of evidence used in the case to prove Christina’s guilt. Her lawyers tried to submit a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, but the jury convicted her anyway. During the sentencing phase of the trial, Christina Riggs did not allow her attorneys to put forward any defense and begged the jury to issue her a death sentence so that she could be with her babies. The jury obliged and sentenced her to death.
Christina Riggs died by lethal injection of potassium chloride 29 months after attempting to commit suicide by use of that exact same toxin.
Defenders of her sentence have argued that Christina orchestrated an elaborate ruse by staging her own death and attempting to appeal to the emotions of the jury, by showing remorse and appearing to beg for her life not to be spared. They cite the fact that she often left her children at home, alone, while she would go out to attend country Karaoke for hours at a time, as evidence that she was a woman fed up with the responsibilities of motherhood and looking for an opportunity to escape. They have used her position as a nurse against her, claiming that her knowledge of pharmaceuticals should have been sufficient to inform her that undiluted potassium chloride would not be capable of killing her, 7 to insinuate that Christina Riggs was an example of the lowest form of woman society could imagine: one looking to shirk her duties as a mother by any means possible, including the murder.
Despite strong appeals made on her behalf by her mother, by the ACLU, and other international organizations opposed to the death penalty, Christina Riggs refused to appeal her own case or plead for clemency on her own behalf. Governor Huckabee told reporters, “With all candor, I find myself very much aware that this would be a first in Arkansas. I am not particularly comfortable or necessarily happy with that. On the other hand, I recognize the crime and the process that we have to go through, and I’ll weigh all of those things, but I’m going to try my best to be as objective as I can be in all of this.”
In the end, at least for Christina Riggs, “objective” meant Governor Huckabee holding fast to his personal belief that a governor does not have the power to grant clemency to a prisoner that had not asked for it. It also meant ignoring the strong appeal of Rita Sklar, Executive Director of the ACLU of Arkansas, when she stated in a letter to the governor, “It would be a terrible shame if the State of Arkansas executed a person with mental illness because 1) a statement was taken from her in a drug-induced hallucinatory state, 2) the jury failed to judge her mental state properly, and 3) she was too depressed or deluded to ask for help herself.” The fact that Christina refused to ask for clemency all the way through her execution is strong evidence against those who tried to claim that she had carefully engineered an elaborate ploy to escape the burden of motherhood, and it might be more applicable to consider whether this was ever really a case of criminal justice and not just an instance of state executed assisted suicide.
- The court had suspended the practice 1972 in the case Furman v. Georgia, under the premise that it constituted cruel and unusual punishment. In response, states began researching ways they could conform their laws and practices of implementing the death penalty in accordance with factors that had caused the Court to impose its original moratorium on the practice. The five death-row inmates bringing their case before the Supreme Court in Gregg v. Georgia were hoping to force the Court to clearly make the case that the death penalty was in violation of the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution. Instead the court ruled “The punishment of death for the crime of murder does not, under all circumstances, violate the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments.” Justices Stewart, Powell and Stevens clarified that position by stating, “Retribution and the possibility of deterrence of capital crimes by prospective offenders are not impermissible considerations for a legislature to weigh in determining whether the death penalty should be imposed, and it cannot be said that Georgia’s legislative judgment that such a penalty is necessary in some cases is clearly wrong.” And “The concerns expressed in Furman that the death penalty not be imposed arbitrarily or capriciously can be met by a carefully drafted statute that ensures that the sentencing authority is given adequate information and guidance, concerns best met by a system that provides for a bifurcated proceeding at which the sentencing authority is apprised of the information relevant to the imposition of sentence and provided with standards to guide its use of that information.” Gregg v. Georgia, 1976.
- The first and, until May 2nd of 2000, only woman put to death in the state of Arkansas was one Lavinia Burnett on November 8th, 1845. Lavinia and her husband Crawford were sentenced to hang after their daughter confessed to authorities that her parents and one of her four brothers had colluded to murder and rob a wealthy town resident known for keeping large sums of money on his property.
- Women account for about 1 in 10 murder arrests; 1 in 50 death sentences imposed at the trial level, 1 in 67 persons presently on death-row, and only 1 in 100 persons actually executed in the modern era, according to the Death Penalty Information Center’s 2016 factsheet.
- Arkansas Department of Correction FY15 statistics.
- Most of the details about Christina’s life and the events leading up to the murder of her two children, were extracted from a number of newspaper articles and obituaries, but most of the details about her life and the things she describes in her journal were found in The Arkansas Times article titled, “They Murder Women, Don’t They” by Michael Haddigan, April 9th, 1999, a year before she was executed.
- RIGGS v. STATE, Arkansas Supreme Court, 1999.
- Despite the fact that the exact formulas used in executions by lethal injection were at that time carefully guarded and varied from state to state.