Tennessee Prepares for Historic Execution as Christa Pike Seeks a Final Delay
Goldlaner.com – Christa Pike, who was 18 when she killed a fellow student in 1995, is scheduled to be executed Wednesday at age 50. If the lethal injection proceeds, it would mark Tennessee’s first execution of a woman in roughly two centuries.
The case has remained among the state’s most closely watched capital punishment proceedings because of the crime’s extreme violence, the youth of those involved and the competing accounts of Pike’s life before and after the killing. Her lawyers have asked the US Supreme Court to halt the execution, while Gov. Bill Lee said Monday that he would not grant clemency.
Pike was convicted alongside her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, for the murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. All were students at the Knoxville Job Corps program. Prosecutors said Pike believed Slemmer was a possible romantic rival and drew her to an isolated location, where Slemmer was tortured and killed.
The killing shocked Knoxville. 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 drew attention during an era when fears surrounding alleged Satan worship were widely amplified.
A death sentence imposed after a teenage crime
Pike has not disputed that she committed the murder. Her legal team instead argues that execution is not an appropriate punishment for a crime committed when she was still a teenager and dealing with untreated mental illness after what they describe as a childhood marked by severe abuse and neglect.
Assistant Federal Defender Stephen Ferrell said Pike was sexually abused from toddlerhood and was raped at ages 11 and 17. Her attorneys contend that lawyers during the punishment phase of the original trial did not give jurors crucial evidence about her upbringing or sufficiently emphasize her age.
She was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. Pike told police that she had first intended to fight Slemmer, but the confrontation escalated into what she described as a frenzied attack.
Her clemency petition argues that the combination of trauma and untreated illness impaired her ability to stop herself.
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.
Ferrell has argued that the understanding of adolescent brain development has changed substantially since Pike was sentenced. He also points to the different outcomes for the other teenagers connected to the case. Shipp was 17 at the time and received life with the possibility of parole because of his age; he was denied parole last year. A third teen admitted being an accessory and was sentenced to probation.
In Tennessee’s modern death-penalty era, Ferrell said, other people sentenced to death for crimes committed at age 18 have later received reduced sentences. Nationwide, the Death Penalty Information Center says 275 people have been executed for offenses committed when they were 18, 19 or 20, though death sentences involving that age group have become 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.
That assessment came from Robin M. Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. The argument does not seek to minimize Slemmer’s death, but it raises the question at the center of Pike’s final legal effort: whether a sentence issued decades ago fully accounted for the circumstances of an 18-year-old defendant.
A mother remembers Colleen Slemmer
For Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, the passage of time has not eased the loss. Speaking from Florida, she said the focus remains on the daughter who never had the opportunity to grow older.
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. She described her as easygoing and said Slemmer and her stepfather frequently built and dismantled computers together.
She was easygoing. She was a computer geek to begin with. She and my husband would build and tear apart the computers constantly. She trusted everybody, and that was her downfall.
On the night Slemmer was killed, Martinez said her daughter called from Job Corps, but the connection kept breaking up because reception was poor. By the time Martinez returned the call, Slemmer had already 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 wants Pike’s sentence carried out, saying she has waited for decades for the case to reach its conclusion. Pike’s scheduled execution therefore brings together two irreversible realities: the devastating death of a 19-year-old woman and the state’s decision over whether to execute the woman convicted of killing her.
With clemency denied and Pike’s Supreme Court request pending, Tennessee faces a moment of unusual historical significance. The outcome will determine not only whether Pike’s sentence is carried out, but whether the state conducts its first execution of a woman in 200 years.
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