Tennessee is set to execute a woman for the first time in 200 years

Tennessee Prepares for Rare Execution of a Woman as Christa Pike Seeks a Halt

Sandego.net – Christa Pike, who was 18 when a Knoxville Job Corps classmate was killed in 1995, is scheduled to die by lethal injection Wednesday. If the execution proceeds, it would mark Tennessee’s first execution of a woman in roughly two centuries.

Now 50, Pike was convicted alongside her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, in the killing of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. The case drew national attention because the defendants were teenagers, the attack was exceptionally violent, and a satanic symbol was carved into Slemmer’s body.

Pike does not contest her responsibility for Slemmer’s death. Her attorneys, however, contend that execution is an inappropriate punishment for a crime committed by a teenager who had experienced severe abuse, neglect and untreated mental illness. They have asked the US Supreme Court to stop the execution. Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee said Monday that he would not grant clemency.

A killing that devastated a family and community

Prosecutors said Pike believed Slemmer was competing with her for a romantic relationship. They said Pike and Shipp brought Slemmer to an isolated location, where she was tortured and killed. The evidence presented in the case included allegations that Pike used a box cutter to cut Slemmer and struck her with a substantial piece of asphalt.

The murder deeply affected Knoxville and occurred during a period when public anxiety over alleged Satanic influences was especially prominent in the 1980s and 1990s. Details involving the symbol cut into Slemmer’s body intensified that attention.

For Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, the passage of decades has not eased the loss. Speaking from Florida, Martinez said the impending execution brings her back to her daughter’s final moments and the opportunities that were taken from her.

“Every time I think about it, I think about Colleen feeling that pain and trying to get up and run,” Martinez said.

Martinez described her daughter as someone who volunteered with the Special Olympics, enjoyed roller skating and hoped to work with computers. Slemmer, she said, was naturally drawn to technology and frequently built and dismantled computers with her stepfather.

“She was easygoing. She was a computer geek to begin with. She and my husband would build and tear apart the computers constantly,” Martinez said. “She trusted everybody, and that was her downfall.”

On the evening Slemmer was killed, she called her mother from Job Corps, but poor reception repeatedly interrupted the conversation. Martinez said that when she returned the call, her daughter had already left.

“Not a day goes by, or a minute goes by that I do not think about Colleen. Holidays are the worst. Colleen’s birthday was last week. She would have been 51,” Martinez said.

Arguments over youth, trauma and punishment

Pike’s legal team has focused its clemency request on the circumstances of her childhood and her age at the time of the crime. Assistant Federal Defender Stephen Ferrell said she was sexually abused beginning when she was a toddler and was raped at ages 11 and 17.

Her lawyers maintain that the jury that decided her punishment did not receive critical evidence about that history during the penalty phase. They also argue that the defense failed to give sufficient weight to her age. Pike was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.

In statements to police, Pike said she had originally intended to fight Slemmer but that the confrontation escalated into a frenzied killing. Her clemency petition argues that untreated mental illness and a traumatic upbringing left her unable to control herself.

“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 with her clemency petition.

Ferrell said research and public understanding of adolescent brain development have advanced since Pike’s trial, making her sentence increasingly unusual. He pointed to the different outcomes for the other teenagers involved in the case. Shipp, who was 17 at the time of the killing, received life in prison with the possibility of parole because he was a minor. He was denied parole last year. A third teen admitted being an accessory and was sentenced to probation.

Ferrell also noted that other people in Tennessee who received death sentences for crimes committed at age 18 have later had those sentences reduced. The dispute surrounding Pike’s case reflects a broader question in capital punishment: how much weight should be given to a defendant’s youth, trauma, mental health and potential for change when the crime itself was committed at the threshold of adulthood?

An increasingly uncommon sentence for very young defendants

The Death Penalty Information Center has said that 275 people across the United States have been executed in the modern death-penalty era for offenses committed when they were 18, 19 or 20. At the same time, death sentences for people in that age range have become less frequent.

Robin M. Maher, the organization’s executive director, said that the evidence of Pike’s childhood could have altered how a present-day jury viewed the appropriate punishment.

“If Christa Pike was tried today, I do not believe a jury that knew about the documented sexual abuse and neglect she experienced as a child would sentence her to death,” Maher said.

The scheduled execution leaves two painful realities in direct tension. Slemmer’s family has waited more than 30 years for the sentence imposed in the case to be carried out, while Pike’s supporters argue that her life history and youth at the time of the offense should prevent the state from executing her.

Unless a court intervenes, Tennessee is set to carry out an execution that would be historically unusual for the state and would close another chapter in a case that has long carried profound consequences for the victim’s family, the convicted woman and the community where the crime occurred.