Pleas to spare the life of Tennessee death row inmate Christa Pike are pouring in to Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee ahead of her execution set for next week.
Should Pike’s execution go ahead, it will make history. She is the only woman on death row in the state. Hers would be the state’s first execution of a woman in more than 200 years, according to Tennesseans for the Alternative to the Death Penalty (TADP). She is the youngest woman to be sentenced to death in the modern era, according to the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide.
The Tennessee Department of Correction announced the execution was scheduled for noon on Wednesday, September 30th, at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.
Pike was convicted of first degree murder in 1996. She was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer, a fellow Jobs Corps worker from Knoxville, Tennessee. Pike and Slemmer’s relationship was strained because Pike (18 at the time) claimed Slemmer had been “trying to get [her] boyfriend” and was “running her mouth everywhere,” according to the narrative of the case from a 2018 appeal in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee.
On January 12, 1995, an acquaintance saw Pike, Slemmer, and two other Job Corps members (one of which was Pike’s boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp) walking from the Job Corps center. A little more than two hours later, the acquaintance saw them return to campus without Slemmer.
Pike told the friend that she had just killed Slemmer, cut her throat six times, beaten her, thrown asphalt at her head, and brought back a piece of Slemmer’s skull as a souvenir. A pentagram had been cut into Slemmer’s forehead and chest, Pike said. The friend said Pike smiled, danced in a circle, and sang “la, la, la” while recounting the details.
Pike’s attorneys have never refuted the facts of the case. Instead, they’ve asked for leniency, usually life in prison, because of a childhood and young adulthood scarred by child sexual abuse, rapes, parental abandonment and neglect, and untreated mental illness.
Many groups now calling for clemency ahead of her execution point to the same reasons.
One group comprised of “organizations and individuals committed to raising awareness of Adverse Childhood Experiences,” argues “Pike’s extraordinary history of childhood adversity should weigh heavily in your consideration of her request for clemency.”
“Christa experienced virtually every form of adversity that those of us who work in this field seek to prevent,” reads the petition. “Her childhood was marked by chronic sexual abuse and rape, physical and emotional abuse, neglect, caregiver substance abuse, domestic and family violence, poverty, food insecurity, repeated moves and changes in schools, unstable caregivers, and the loss of the one adult she experienced as a consistent source of love and security.”
Pike’s lawyers, too, have petitioned Lee. A 226-page clemency appeal last week said “her actions at 18 years old cannot be separated from a childhood marked by repeated rape, sexual abuse, and neglect that went unaddressed by the adults and state systems meant to protect her.” They said once she was incarcerated, Pike was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Another group, called Mercy for Christa, has asked Lee the same, for the same reasons.
“Life imprisonment is a proper punishment for Christa, just as it is for the nearly 200 women convicted of first degree murder who did not receive death in Tennessee since 1978,” says Mercy for Christa.
The Atlanta-based Advocates Fighting to End Gender-Based Violence, a coalition of many groups from across the country, also appealed to Lee.
The United Nations’ own Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, urged U.S. and Tennessee officials broadly to halt the execution and commute her sentence to life in prison.
“Pike’s execution would mark the culmination of a trajectory of severe physical and psychological suffering marked by childhood abuse and nearly three decades of solitary confinement on death row,” the office said.
