Christa Pike, a woman convicted of murder 30 years ago, is set to be put to death on Wednesday after her request for clemency was denied by Tennessee governor Bill Lee on Monday. If the execution goes through, she will be the first woman executed in the state in 200 years.
Background of the case
Pike, who is now 50, was 18 when she and her boyfriend, who was 17 at the time, killed 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, one of their classmates at Knoxville Job Corps in 1995. The case received widespread attention because of the brutality of the killing, the ages of the people involved, and because a satanic symbol was carved into the victim's body.
Pike was convicted of first-degree murder the following year and sentenced to death, making her the youngest woman to be put on death row in modern US history. Since her sentence, her history as a victim of sexual abuse and mental health challenges has come to light.
Clemency request and response
As her execution date approached, civil rights groups like the ACLU and Amnesty International called on the public to reach out to the governor's office to ask that he take Pike off of death row. But Lee declined to halt her execution.
“After deliberate consideration of Christa Gail Pike's request for clemency and after a thorough review of the case, I am upholding the sentence of the State of Tennessee and do not plan to intervene,” he said in a statement.
In response to Lee's decision, Pike's attorneys said that they were “deeply saddened and heartbroken” by the governor's decision and that through this choice the state is dismissing decades of research about the amount of responsibility an 18-year-old – especially one with severe trauma – should bear for their criminal actions.
“Throughout her childhood, Christa was failed by people and institutions that should have shown her care and meaningful intervention,” Pike's attorneys said in a statement. “The 18-year-old girl suffering from severe mental illness and near-debilitating trauma no longer exists. Christa is a 50-year-old remorseful woman who understands her actions, receives proper treatment for her mental illness, and provides for and guides fellow incarcerated women.”
Legal arguments and victim's family
Pike's attorneys have also asked the supreme court to stay the execution. Assistant federal defender Stephen Ferrell said Pike was sexually abused starting from when she was a toddler and that she was raped at 11 and 17. He said Pike's lawyers at the penalty phase of her trial did not present the jury with what he said was critical information about her past or argue that her age should be a consideration.
Pike, who has never denied her role in Slemmer's killing, was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. “I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid. It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I'd done. Even more to accept how many lives I affected. I took the life of someone's child, sister, friend. It sickens me now to think I had the ability to commit such a crime,” Pike said in a statement included in her clemency petition.
Ferrell said more is known today about adolescent brain development and that Pike's death sentence is an outlier. He noted that Pike's boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, who was 17 at the time, was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole because of his age. He was denied parole last year. A third teen admitted to being an accessory and received probation.
May Martinez, Slemmer's mother, told the Associated Press that her daughter volunteered with the Special Olympics, loved roller skating and wanted to pursue a career in computers. “She was easygoing. She was a computer geek to begin with. She and my husband would build and tear apart the computers constantly,” Martinez told the outlet. “She trusted everybody, and that was her downfall.”
The last woman executed in Tennessee was in 1820, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Martin Eve, charged with being an accessory to murder, was executed by hanging. Most recently, Missouri in 2023 executed Amber McLaughlin, a transgender woman, for a 2003 killing, in what is believed to be the first execution of a transgender woman in the US. In 2021, the federal government executed Lisa Montgomery, marking the first time in nearly seven decades that the US government has put a female inmate to death. Georgia executed a woman in 2015.
