Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has refused to intervene on behalf of death row inmate Christa Pike, who remains scheduled to be put to death by lethal injection on Wednesday, 30 September, after years of failed appeals and a last-ditch clemency request.
Pike, who is 50, was convicted of the 1995 first-degree murder of Colleen Slemmer, a 19-year-old whom she and her then-boyfriend had met only weeks earlier at a job training camp for troubled teens. Attorneys for Pike say they have now filed a petition with the US Supreme Court seeking a last-minute reprieve, leaving the case in legal limbo right up to the scheduled execution date.
Should the sentence be carried out, Pike would become the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years. Her case is also unusually rare on a national scale: according to the figures cited in the case, only 18 women have been executed in the United States since the 1970s, compared with 1,663 men — a disparity that her defence team and death penalty critics regularly cite as evidence of a capital punishment system that treats women differently from men.
In a statement, the governor said: "After deliberate consideration of Christa Gail Pike's request for clemency, and after a thorough review of the case, I am upholding the sentence of the State of Tennessee and do not plan to intervene." The clemency petition had been filed earlier in the month and asked for Pike's death sentence to be commuted to life in prison.
Her lawyers argue that going ahead would place Tennessee "on singular footing", pointing out that Pike would be the first person the state has executed in the modern death penalty era who was a teenager at the time of the offence. Under US law, the death penalty may not be imposed on anyone who was under 18 when the crime was committed, a protection that has only become central to the legal debate in recent decades.
Attorneys Stephen Ferrell, Kelly Gleason and Randy Spivey said the governor's decision "leaves unanswered vital questions about Tennessee's execution protocol", adding in a statement on Monday that Tennessee was "ignoring what both science and our legal system have decided: an 18-year-old brain is not an adult brain, and 18 is too young to face execution." The reference to science reflects a body of research, widely cited in capital cases, that the adolescent brain continues developing into the mid-20s — a finding relied upon by defence teams to argue against imposing irreversible punishment on people who were minors when they offended.
The 1995 killing prompted an intense media frenzy in Knoxville, where Slemmer's body was found with a pentagram — a symbol associated with Satanic ritual — carved into her chest. Pike had accused Slemmer of insulting her and of trying to steal her boyfriend, according to the account in the case.
At trial, two other residents at the camp testified that Pike bragged about the murder both before and after it happened, and that she showed them a piece of Colleen's skull. A year after the killing, Pike was convicted and sentenced to death. Her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, who was 17 at the time, received a life sentence with the possibility of parole — a disparity in outcomes that has featured in later arguments over whether the case was handled fairly.
At the time she entered prison custody, the 21-year-old Pike was the youngest person on death row in the state, according to the Tennessee Department of Corrections. Since then, her defence team has pursued a series of appeals, none of which has succeeded.
Much of the latest legal argument rests on Pike's own history, which her lawyers say was never properly before the jury. She has a documented record of childhood sexual abuse, abandonment and neglect, and her team says they have uncovered further details about her upbringing that original jurors never had the chance to weigh. Her attorneys argue that if she were tried and found guilty of the same offence today as a teenager, she would not face a death sentence.
"The 18-year-old girl suffering from severe mental illness and near-debilitating trauma no longer exists," her attorneys said. "Christa is a 50-year-old remorseful woman who understands her actions, receives proper treatment for her mental illness, and provides for and guides fellow incarcerated women." The comments are intended to support the argument that significant mitigating evidence — now decades old and only recently brought to light — was left out of her original trial.
On the other side, members of the victim's family have made clear that they want the sentence carried out. Colleen's mother has said she wishes the execution to go ahead so that her daughter "finally can be resting", a position that has drawn thanks from those who oppose further delays in cases of this kind.
Wednesday's execution therefore pits two long-running arguments against each other: the question of whether a state may lawfully execute someone who committed their crime as a child, and whether a conviction handed down a quarter of a century ago — before much of her mitigating history was known — should still be treated as just. With the Supreme Court petition pending and no indication from the governor's office of further intervention, the decision now rests with the courts, and the state has said it intends to proceed.
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