Tennessee Set to Execute Christa Pike Wednesday, First Woman Put to Death in the State Since 1819

Tennessee is three days from executing Christa Pike, who would become the first woman put to death in the state since 1819 and only the fourth in Tennessee history.

Pike, now 50, was 18 in January 1995 when she and her then-boyfriend, 17-year-old Tadaryl Shipp, lured 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer into the woods near a Knoxville job training camp for troubled teens. According to court documents cited by USA Today, Pike kneed Slemmer in the head, kicked her repeatedly, and when Slemmer tried to run, chased her down. Colleen was found with a pentagram carved into her chest. Two other camp residents later testified Pike bragged about the killing and showed off a piece of Slemmer's skull, per BBC reporting. Pike was sentenced to death in 1996. Shipp got life with the possibility of parole.

Thirty years later, Pike's defense team argues the jury that condemned her never heard the full story of her childhood. Court documents obtained by USA Today show Pike was raped by her grandmother's boyfriend from before preschool through kindergarten, raped again at age 11 by a neighbor in an attack that caused an infection and preceded a suicide attempt at 12, and raped a third time at 17 by a stranger who dragged her into the woods. A 1995 forensic psychologist's report, compiled by Dr. Diana McCoy but never presented at trial, documented severe neglect by both of Pike's parents on top of the sexual abuse, according to BBC.

Sandra Babcock, a Cornell Law School expert on gender and the death penalty who has worked on Pike's defense, called it "mind-boggling" that none of this history was presented to jurors who already knew about it.

That history is now the basis of an unusual legal argument. Pike's lawyers, backed by a friend-of-the-court brief from a dozen women's advocacy groups filed in the Tennessee Supreme Court on September 10, argued that being strapped down by a team of men and injected by a male doctor, possibly near her groin if a vein can't be found in her arm, would functionally re-create her assaults. Clinical psychologist Dr. Bethany Brand, who interviewed Pike in 2023, testified that trauma flashbacks can be so intense a person "loses all awareness of where they actually are," according to Truthout. Fox News's Outnumbered panel covered a related request from Pike's team: an all-female execution team and death by hanging instead of lethal injection, citing that same history of abuse by men.

A reasonable person sympathetic to Pike's argument would note that the state does not dispute a word of the abuse. Tennessee Attorney General's Office lawyer Will Ayers told the court, "I think everybody in this courtroom wishes that those things had never happened to Ms. Pike." The legal fight isn't over whether Pike suffered horrifically as a child. It's over whether that suffering legally excuses the state from carrying out a sentence a jury already imposed.

Shelby County Senior Judge Mark Ward, appointed as a special master by the Tennessee Supreme Court to hear the claim, ruled against Pike after a three-day hearing, finding her team had "failed" to prove the execution would cause "needless suffering" or that she could avoid mental suffering under any method. Ayers argued at the hearing that "the standard is not a painless execution" and that "psychological harm alone is not a violation." If the Tennessee Supreme Court upholds Ward's findings, Pike's lawyers say they will appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Her last resort is Republican Gov. Bill Lee, who received a 226-page clemency petition earlier this month asking him to commute the sentence to life without parole. UN human rights experts have also called for the execution to be halted, per BBC. Colleen Slemmer's mother has taken the opposite position, saying she wants the execution to proceed so her daughter "finally can be resting."

None of this changes what a jury found in 1996: that Pike, along with Shipp, tortured a 19-year-old to death with a box cutter and a meat cleaver over a jealous grudge. The abuse Pike suffered as a child is real and undisputed by the state. Whether it should override a death sentence handed down three decades ago is a question Tennessee's courts and Gov. Lee still have to answer, and they have until Wednesday to do it.

If the execution proceeds, Pike will join a short list. Only 18 women have been executed in the U.S. since 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, out of 45 currently on death row nationwide. The Tennessean's review of historical records found the state's only prior female executions were hangings in 1807, 1808, and 1819, the last two of enslaved Black women whose names went unrecorded. Pike would be the first Tennessee woman executed since formal record-keeping began.