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

Tennessee faces a historic execution as Christa Pike seeks a final stay

Activelifezero.com – Christa Pike, who was 18 when she killed a fellow student in 1995, is scheduled to receive a lethal injection Wednesday in Tennessee. If the execution proceeds, it would mark the first time the state has executed a woman in roughly two centuries.

Pike is now 50 and remains one of the youngest women ever sent to death row. Her case has returned to public attention because of both the circumstances of the crime and the continuing dispute over whether a death sentence is appropriate for an offense committed by a teenager with a history of abuse and untreated mental illness.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee said Monday that he would not grant clemency. Pike’s legal team has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to halt the execution.

The 1995 killing

Pike and her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, were convicted of killing 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a classmate at Knoxville Job Corps. Prosecutors said Pike believed Slemmer was competing with her romantically and brought her to an isolated location, where Slemmer was tortured and killed.

The killing deeply disturbed Knoxville and drew national scrutiny. Prosecutors said Slemmer was cut with a box cutter and beaten with a large piece of asphalt. A satanic symbol carved into her body also became a central and troubling detail in a case that unfolded during the lingering cultural fears surrounding Satan worship in the 1980s and 1990s.

Pike has not disputed that she was responsible for Slemmer’s death. She told police that she had initially intended to fight Slemmer but described the violence as escalating into a frenzied attack.

Arguments over age, trauma and punishment

Pike’s attorneys and supporters contend that the jury did not receive crucial evidence during the sentencing phase of her trial. They say her childhood was marked by severe neglect, repeated sexual abuse and significant trauma, while her mental-health needs went untreated.

Assistant Federal Defender Stephen Ferrell said Pike was sexually abused from toddlerhood and was raped when she was 11 and again at 17. She was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. Her clemency petition argues that these conditions and experiences left her unable to control herself at the time of the crime.

“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 has argued that contemporary research into adolescent development makes Pike’s case unusually severe. He also pointed to the sharply different outcomes for the other teenagers involved. Shipp, who was 17 at the time, received life in prison with a chance for parole because he was a minor; parole was denied last year. A third teenager admitted being an accessory and was sentenced to probation.

In Tennessee’s modern death-penalty era, other defendants sentenced to death for crimes committed at age 18 have later had their punishments reduced. Nationally, the Death Penalty Information Center says 275 people have been executed for crimes committed when they were 18, 19 or 20, though death sentences for people in that age range have grown increasingly uncommon.

“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,” Robin M. Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said.

A mother’s enduring loss

For Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, the focus remains on the daughter who never had the chance to become an adult. Speaking by telephone from Florida, Martinez said she has waited decades for Pike’s sentence to be carried out.

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

Slemmer volunteered with the Special Olympics, enjoyed roller skating and hoped to work with computers. Martinez described her as easygoing and said she often took computers apart and rebuilt them 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.”

Martinez recalled that her daughter called from Job Corps on the night she was killed, but poor reception interrupted the conversation. By the time Martinez called back, Slemmer had 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.

A case that remains unresolved in the public conscience

The impending execution has brought together difficult questions that do not have easy answers: the lasting devastation of violent crime, the purpose of capital punishment, and the weight courts should give to youth, trauma and mental illness when determining punishment.

For Martinez, the scheduled execution represents accountability for her daughter’s killing. For Pike’s advocates, it is a test of whether a person’s teenage actions and profoundly traumatic upbringing should determine whether the state can end her life decades later. Tennessee’s decision, if carried out Wednesday, will become a significant moment in the state’s long and fraught history with the death penalty.