Tennessee to execute Christa Pike, its first woman on death row in two centuries, as defence fights reprieve

A 50-year-old woman is due to be put to death by lethal injection in Tennessee on Wednesday, in a case that has rekindled debate over the gender and racial geography of capital punishment in the United States. Christa Pike, who has spent more than three decades on death row, will become the first woman executed in the Volunteer State in more than 200 years if the sentence goes ahead as scheduled on 30 September.

Pike was 18 years old in 1995 when she and her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, beat, tortured and murdered Colleen Slemmer, a 19-year-old they had met at a job training camp for troubled teens. The killing triggered a media frenzy in Knoxville after Slemmer's body was discovered with a pentagram — a symbol associated with Satanic ritual — carved into her chest. Pike had accused her victim of insulting her and of trying to steal her boyfriend, and two other residents at the camp later testified that Pike bragged about the murder both before and after it happened, at one point showing them a piece of Slemmer's skull.

A year later, Pike was sentenced to death. Shipp, who was 17 at the time of the offence, received a life sentence with the possibility of parole. Since then, Pike has pursued a series of appeals without success, and her execution date was set after those avenues were exhausted.

Her case has also become a focal point for a small but organised group of academics and advocates who argue that executions of women, and of defendants with profound childhood trauma, raise distinctive constitutional questions. Pike's lawyers have filed a 226-page clemency petition asking Tennessee Governor Bill Lee to commute her sentence, and UN human rights experts have formally urged that the execution be halted.

A friend, Ashlee Sellars, spoke to Pike earlier this week when the condemned woman texted her from her cell. Pike asked that none of her loved ones be present on Wednesday, Sellars said, because she did not want them to have to witness it. Sellars described the difficulty of reconciling the woman she knows as kind and protective with the teenager convicted three decades ago of a heinous crime.

On the other side of the argument, Slemmer's mother has said publicly that she wants the execution to proceed so that her daughter can finally be at rest — a position that reflects the sheer scale of violence inflicted on a young woman whose killing remains notorious in Tennessee.

Pike's defence team does not dispute the gravity of the offence. Instead, it argues that the sentence is unconstitutional in light of a documented history of childhood sexual abuse, abandonment and neglect, contending that a teenager convicted of the same offence today would not face the death penalty. Working with the defence is Sandra Babcock, an expert on gender and the death penalty at Cornell Law School, who describes it as astonishing that the original trial team failed to present any of her history of abuse and rape, even though they were aware of it. Babcock says the case is unusually compelling, not simply because of the extent of sexual violence Pike endured, but because that history combines with her youth and her mental illness.

Much of that history was documented even in 1995. Forensic psychologist Dr Diana McCoy, hired by Pike's defence at the time, found that she had been severely neglected by both parents, physically and sexually abused by several of her mother's husbands and boyfriends, and raped on multiple occasions — at 11 and again at 17. It was later established that she had been repeatedly raped as a toddler by her grandmother's boyfriend. McCoy recorded that Pike's mother did not believe her daughter's accounts.

But McCoy was never called to the stand, and the trial lawyer did not call many of the witnesses she recommended. Those details surfaced more than a decade afterwards, during a post-conviction hearing, when a new legal team argued that Pike had received ineffective assistance of counsel. The judge rejected that claim.

The case has also been reshaped by diagnoses made inside prison. In 2021, Pike was found to have bipolar disorder and has been medicated since. Dr Bethany Brand, a forensic psychologist who assessed her for the defence in 2023, says the case is exceptionally rare because Pike was abused by so many people who should have protected her, describing a childhood replete with physical, sexual and emotional abuse, with violations beginning before she was school age. Brand believes untreated manic episodes and untreated post-traumatic stress disorder together shaped both how threatened Pike felt by Slemmer and her lack of emotional control during the confrontation.

Nationally, the figures underscore how rare executions of women are. Only 18 women have been executed in the US since the 1970s, compared with 1,663 men. Babcock argues that proceeding would make an uncomfortable point about the death penalty: that it is applied not only to the worst offenders but to those who receive the poorest legal representation and are among the most damaged and vulnerable.

With the date days away and appeals exhausted, the outcome now rests with the clemency process. If no last-minute reprieve is granted, Tennessee will carry out its first execution of a woman in more than two centuries — a distinction on which the victim’s family and Pike's own defence sharply disagree.