Execution countdown for Christa Pike divides Tennessee as defence fights for reprieve

Christa Pike is due to be put to death by lethal injection in Tennessee on Wednesday 30 September, becoming the first woman executed in the state in more than two centuries if the sentence goes ahead as planned. The 50-year-old has spent nearly three decades on death row since her conviction for the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer, and years of appeals have failed to overturn or delay her fate. Her defence team is now relying on a clemency petition and international pressure in a last attempt to secure a reprieve.

The 50-year-old has sought to spare her family the scene. Ashlee Sellars, a friend who last heard from Pike earlier in the week when she texted from her death row cell, said the condemned woman does not want any of her loved ones present on Wednesday. "She doesn't want us to experience that," Sellars said, describing the difficulty of reconciling the person she knows — kind and protective — with the profile of someone convicted of a heinous killing three decades ago.

The crime took place in 1995, when Pike was 18. She and her boyfriend at the time, Tadaryl Shipp, beat, tortured and murdered 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, whom they had met at a job training camp for troubled teens. The case triggered a media frenzy in Knoxville after Slemmer's body was found with a pentagram, a symbol associated with Satanic ritual, carved into her chest. According to the account given to the jury, Pike had accused Slemmer of insulting her and of trying to take her boyfriend away from her.

Prosecutors also relied on testimony from two other residents at the camp, who later said Pike bragged about the murder both before and after it, and at one point showed them a piece of the victim's skull. Pike was sentenced to death a year later. Shipp, who was 17 at the time of the killing, received a life sentence with the possibility of parole — a disparity her lawyers have pointed to as part of the case for why her punishment is seen as unjust.

The broader picture of punishment in the United States sharpens the significance of Wednesday's date. Only 18 women have been executed in the country since the 1970s, compared with 1,663 men. Pike has long been described as the sole woman on Tennessee's death row, and her execution would return a state that has not put a woman to death since the early 19th century to a grim statistical milestone.

For the family of the murdered teenager, however, the case is not a referendum on capital punishment but on closure. Colleen Slemmer's mother has said she wants the execution to proceed so that her daughter "finally can be resting" — a sentiment that has hardened the atmosphere around the case and left the two camps in the legal fight, one pushing for the sentence and one begging for it to stop, with few bridges between them.

On the defence side, lawyers have filed a 226-page clemency petition setting out in detail why Pike's sentence should be commuted. They are hoping for a last-minute intervention, and UN human rights experts have added their voices, calling for the execution to be halted. Their argument rests in large part on the idea that Pike is as much a victim of her own life circumstances as she is a perpetrator of someone else's death.

The petition draws heavily on a documented history of childhood sexual abuse, abandonment and neglect. Pike's lawyers contend that if she were tried for the same crime today, as a teenager, she would not receive a death sentence — a comparison they say demonstrates how much has changed in sentencing practice and how little the original proceedings accounted for her background.

Much of the material in the petition traces back to a 1995 report by forensic psychologist Dr Diana McCoy, who was hired by the original defence team. McCoy found that Pike had been severely neglected by both parents, physically and sexually abused by several of her mother's husbands and boyfriends, and raped several times, including at the ages of 11 and 17. It later emerged that she had been repeatedly raped as a toddler by her grandmother's boyfriend. McCoy said Pike's mother did not believe her when she reported the assaults.

Crucially, the trial lawyer never called McCoy to the stand, nor did she call many of the witnesses the psychologist had recommended. Those details surfaced only more than a decade later, during a post-conviction hearing at which a new team of lawyers argued that Pike had received ineffective assistance of counsel. The judge denied that claim, but the episode remains central to the argument that the jury never heard the full story of the woman it was sentencing.

Sandra Babcock, an expert on gender and the death penalty at Cornell Law School who has worked on Pike's defence, said it is "mind-boggling" that the abuse and rape were not presented at trial, even though the defence team knew about them. She described the case as uniquely compelling — not merely because of the extent of the sexual violence Pike suffered, but because of the combination of that history with her youth and her mental illness.

That mental illness has been formally established. Pike was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in prison in 2021 and has been medicated since. A second forensic psychologist, Dr Bethany Brand, assessed her in 2023 and said the case was extremely rare because she had been abused by so many people who ought to have protected her. Brand said Pike's childhood was saturated with physical, sexual and emotional abuse, with violations by a number of men beginning before she was even school age.

Brand also argued that untreated manic episodes associated with bipolar disorder, alongside untreated post-traumatic stress disorder, shaped how threatened Pike felt by Slemmer and how little emotional control she had in that confrontation. It is an assessment that reframes the 1995 killing from the standpoint of a vulnerable adolescent rather than a cold-blooded murderer.

Babcock's blunt conclusion is that if Pike is executed, the episode will reveal that capital punishment in the country "is just a joke" — reserved not for the worst offenders but for those who receive the worst legal representation and are the most damaged and vulnerable. As Wednesday approaches, the case is being watched as a test of whether a system that has so rarely punished women will do so here, and whether decades of claimed failure by the courts will count for anything at all.