Source:AP
Front Picture: Tennessee Department of Corrections
Tennessee Set to Execute Only Woman on Death Row in First Case in Over 200 Years
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Tennessee is preparing to carry out its first execution of a woman in more than two centuries.
Christa Pike, 50, is scheduled to die by lethal injection on Sept. 30 at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. She has been the sole woman on Tennessee’s death row for 30 years.
Pike was sentenced to death in March 1996 for the 1995 murder of her Job Corps classmate, 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, in Knoxville. Prosecutors said Pike lured Slemmer to an isolated wooded area and killed her with the help of her then 17-year-old boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp. Shipp received life in prison because he was a juvenile at the time of the crime and was ineligible for the death penalty.
Her execution would be the first of a woman in the state since 1819.
Pike’s lawyers are making a final push for clemency. On Sept. 2, her legal team filed a more than 200-page petition with Gov. Bill Lee asking that her death sentence be commuted to life without parole. The petition does not contest her conviction.
The filing centers on Pike’s background. Attorneys argue that jurors who sentenced her to death did not hear the full extent of childhood sexual abuse, neglect and instability she endured, including abuse that began as a toddler. They also point to diagnoses of bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, and to research on adolescent brain development. Pike was 18 at the time of the crime, making her the youngest woman sentenced to death in the modern era in the United States, according to her defense.
The petition argues that Pike has changed during nearly three decades in custody, much of it in restrictive housing. The U.N. human rights office has noted she spent about 28 years in conditions amounting to solitary confinement.
Separately, Pike’s team challenged the state’s lethal injection protocol. They argued that a blood disorder that causes excess platelets and her history of trauma would make an execution unnecessarily painful and psychologically harmful. They asked that if the execution proceeds, it be carried out by an all-female team. A special master and the Tennessee Supreme Court rejected that challenge. On Sept. 23, the state high court ruled the execution could go forward.
The case has drawn international attention. On Sept. 7, U.N. experts called on federal and state authorities to halt the execution, saying it would be the culmination of a trajectory of severe suffering marked by childhood abuse and prolonged isolation. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights issued a similar appeal.
Gov. Lee has not yet announced a decision on clemency. He is the only authority who can commute Pike’s sentence.
