Tennessee is preparing to carry out the Christa Pike execution at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 30, at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. Gov. Bill Lee has refused to spare her. If the lethal injection goes ahead, the 50-year-old will become the first woman executed by the state in more than two centuries.
In her final days, Pike asked for something the state says it cannot give her. She wanted to be hanged.
A request the state can’t carry out
Pike’s lawyers tied the request to her history of sexual abuse. They argue that being restrained on a gurney and handled by male corrections officers could force her to relive past assaults.
Hanging is not a realistic option. Tennessee has no protocol, no trained staff and no equipment for it.
Her legal team also asked that only women take part in the lethal injection. The state agreed to some changes. Pike remained at the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center, the women’s prison in Nashville, until roughly 24 hours before the execution, and an all-female crew handled her transport. Officials would not promise that only women would be in the execution chamber.
According to the Tennessee Department of Correction, Pike also declined to choose a last meal.
In an audio recording shared with The New York Times, Pike said she goes over the execution in her head every day. She also questioned what the state hopes to achieve after three decades. Nobody, she said, should “kill me to teach me that killing someone is wrong.”
The 1995 killing at Knoxville Job Corps
The crime dates to Jan. 12, 1995. Pike, then 18, and 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer were both enrolled at the Knoxville Job Corps, a federal training program for struggling teenagers.
Pike had convinced herself that Slemmer was after her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp. Slemmer was led to an isolated spot near the University of Tennessee’s agricultural campus, where she was beaten and cut over a long attack before she was killed. Shipp carved a pentagram into her chest. Pike took a piece of Slemmer’s skull and later showed it to other students.
A third teenager, Shadolla Peterson, was there that night. The three walked away with very different fates. Shipp was 17 and too young for the death penalty, so he received a life sentence. Peterson testified against the other two and got probation.
A jury convicted Pike of first-degree murder in 1996 and sentenced her to death. That made her the youngest woman ever sent to Tennessee’s death row. She added to her record behind bars. In 2001 she strangled a fellow inmate with a shoestring, and in 2004 she was convicted of attempted first-degree murder.
The case for mercy
Pike’s attorneys asked Lee to commute her sentence to life without parole. Their petition focused on her life before the murder.
The Death Penalty Information Center, which tracks capital punishment, reports that Pike was sexually abused from early childhood. At 11, she was raped by a neighbor who never went to prison and later moved back nearby. She was raped again at 17, about a year before Slemmer died. Pike was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. Her lawyers say her mental health was never properly weighed at sentencing. They described her as damaged by the institutions that were supposed to help her, rather than as evil.
Lee was not persuaded. On Monday he said he had reviewed her request and the case and would not intervene. Days earlier, the Tennessee Supreme Court had refused to halt the execution.
The case carries weight beyond Tennessee. Pike would be the 19th woman executed in the United States since 1976. The last woman Tennessee put to death was executed in 1820. Her lawyers say she will also be the first person Tennessee has executed in the modern era who was a teenager when the crime happened. That point sits at the center of a wider debate over whether 18-year-olds should face the death penalty.
A mother who has waited 31 years
For Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, the argument about Pike’s past misses the point.
At trial, prosecutors passed her daughter’s broken skull around the courtroom as evidence while Martinez watched. More than a decade passed before a court ordered the remains returned to the family. She told The New York Times she has never been the same person since.
Martinez has little patience for Pike’s final requests. Speaking to the Daily Mail, she said Pike deserves no special treatment and accused her of working the system. She has said she does not believe Pike has changed.
She and her husband, Raul Martinez, plan to be in the viewing room. Raul wrote on Facebook that they would be there on the morning of Sept. 30 to make sure the sentence is carried out.
Barring a last-minute order from the U.S. Supreme Court, the execution is set to begin at 10 a.m. Central time. That would come more than 31 years after Colleen Slemmer was killed.
