As Tennessee prepares for what will be a historic and deeply divisive capital punishment event, 50-year-old Christa Pike is counting down her final days on death row, with a lethal injection execution scheduled for September 30. If carried out, the sentence will mark the first time a woman has been put to death in the state in more than two centuries, joining a small group of just 18 women executed across the United States since the 1970s, compared to 1,663 men over the same period. What has unfolded in the weeks leading up to the execution is a fierce national debate over trauma, inadequate legal representation, and the role of mercy in the U.S. justice system.
The origins of the case stretch back 31 years to 1995, when 18-year-old Pike and her then-boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp, 17 at the time, tortured and murdered 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer at a Tennessee job training camp for at-risk youth. The gruesome details of the killing — including a pentagram carved into Slemmer’s chest and testimony that Pike bragged about the murder and even displayed a fragment of the victim’s skull to other camp residents — sparked sensational media frenzy across Knoxville and the surrounding region. Pike claimed the killing stemmed from a dispute: she had accused Slemmer of insulting her and attempting to steal her boyfriend. Shipp, who was a minor at the time of the crime, received a life sentence with the possibility of parole, while Pike was sentenced to death just a year after the killing.
After decades of failed legal appeals, all legal roads have all but run out for Pike. The only remaining chance to halt the execution rests with a last-minute 226-page clemency petition filed by her legal team, which is asking Tennessee Governor Bill Lee to commute her death sentence to life imprisonment. To date, Lee has never granted clemency in any death penalty case, and any final decision is not expected until the final hours before the scheduled execution. Courts have already repeatedly ruled against delays: just this week, the Tennessee Supreme Court rejected Pike’s latest request to halt the proceeding, and federal appeals courts have previously held that new evidence of mental illness and childhood abuse would not have changed the jury’s original guilty verdict.
Pike’s legal team and death penalty opponents have built their plea for clemency around two core arguments: first, that the extreme trauma and abuse Pike endured from early childhood left her with lifelong unaddressed mental illness, and second, that her original trial counsel provided egregiously inadequate representation by never presenting this critical context to the jury. Court documents and forensic psychological assessments confirm that Pike experienced severe, repeated abuse starting in toddlerhood: she was sexually assaulted by multiple men in her family, including her mother’s romantic partners and her grandmother’s boyfriend, with documented rapes occurring when she was just 11 years old and again at 17. Her mother refused to believe her accounts of abuse, leaving her in a constant state of neglect and abandonment. A 1995 psychological assessment by Dr. Diana McCoy, commissioned by Pike’s original defense team, outlined the full scope of this abuse — but her trial attorneys never called McCoy to testify, nor did they call the other witnesses she recommended. These devastating details only emerged more than a decade later during post-conviction review hearings, when a new legal team argued the original representation was ineffective, a claim judges ultimately rejected. In recent years, further assessments have confirmed Pike lives with bipolar disorder and complex post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), conditions that went undiagnosed and untreated for decades. Forensic psychologist Dr. Bethany Brand, who assessed Pike in 2023, noted that both untreated conditions directly amplified Pike’s sense of threat from Slemmer and eroded her ability to control her emotions at the time of the killing. Sandra Babcock, a death penalty and gender expert at Cornell Law School who joined Pike’s defense team, called the failure to present this abuse history to the jury “mind-boggling.” “Her case is so uniquely compelling, not just because of her really incomprehensible history of sexual violence but the combination of that with her youth and her mental illness,” Babcock said. She added that if Pike is executed, it exposes a fatal flaw in the U.S. death penalty system: “It is not for the worst of the worst. It is for the people who receive the worst legal representation and who are the most damaged and vulnerable.” Her legal team also notes that if Pike, who was 18 at the time of the crime, were tried today, modern sentencing norms would almost certainly rule out a death sentence. United Nations human rights experts have also joined the call to halt the execution.
For the family of Colleen Slemmer, however, there is no case for clemency. Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, has repeatedly stated she wants the execution to move forward so her daughter can “finally be resting.” In comments to the BBC this week, Martinez reaffirmed her 2021 statement to local Knoxville outlet WBIR: “She did the crime. I think she should pay for it.” Martinez, who says she relives her daughter’s brutal death every single day, has stated she wants Pike to experience the same pain her daughter suffered, and she hopes to see the execution carried out before her own death. The Justice Coalition, a U.S. victim’s rights advocacy group, has raised funds to cover Martinez’s travel to the prison so she can attend the execution. Group executive director Robert Bracewell said the sentence was handed down by a jury of Pike’s peers, and aligns with what the Slemmer family has demanded for decades: “We stand firm with the family that on the 30 September her execution ought to proceed.”
Those close to Pike paint a portrait of a woman far removed from the 18-year-old who committed the 1995 killing, and who has asked that none of her loved ones attend her execution to spare them the trauma of watching her death. “She doesn’t want us to experience that,” Ashlee Sellars, a close friend of Pike’s who met the defendant while both were incarcerated, told reporters. Sellars, who now works as a justice reform advocate after serving her own sentence for a robbery-murder, says she has only ever known Pike to be kind and protective, and struggles to reconcile the woman she knows with the perpetrator of the 1995 crime. Sellars says she recognizes Martinez’s right to seek justice, but argues that unaddressed childhood trauma and mental illness created the conditions for the killing decades ago. “When I think about reconciling who you see on TV or the horrible tragedy that happened with Colleen, the only thing that makes sense to me is around mental health and trauma and the way that people process stuff in a moment when they don’t have the things that they need,” she said. “People want to know that everyone’s life matters, right? They want to know that Colleen’s life mattered. Christa in this moment, I think she is fighting much more for her life to matter than she is to actually live.”
In a final request shaped by her lifelong trauma of sexual violence, Pike has asked for an all-female execution team, saying being restrained by male guards would worsen her existing trauma. Tennessee officials have stated they aim to assign female guards to transport Pike to the execution facility, but have not committed to a fully all-female team. With less than 48 hours remaining before the scheduled execution, Pike’s legal team says it is continuing to map out next steps as they wait for Governor Lee’s final decision on clemency.