We were about an hour away from the execution when the stop came. Christa Gail Pike, 50, was not executed in Tennessee after the federal appeals court stayed the execution to allow further review of her case. The judges want to verify in particular whether the allegations of sexual violence and rape suffered during childhood were adequately taken into consideration when Pike was sentenced to death. The order came around 9 am local time, while the lethal injection was scheduled for 10 am at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. The witnesses authorized to witness the execution had already arrived at the penitentiary.
Who is Christa Pike and why was she sentenced to death
Pike is the only woman on Tennessee’s death row. The conviction dates back to the murder of Colleen Slemmer, 19, which occurred 31 years ago, in January 1995, in Knoxville. At the time, Pike was 18 years old. According to the prosecution’s reconstruction, together with her boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp and Shadolla Peterson she lured Slemmer into a wooded area. The girl was beaten and stabbed. A pentagram was also engraved on his body, an element that contributed to giving enormous resonance to the case in the years of the so-called “satanic panic” in the United States.
Pike and Shipp were convicted of first-degree murder. Pike received the death penalty, while Shipp, who was 17 at the time of the crime, was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole. Peterson, who cooperated with the prosecution, instead received a probationary sentence.
The rapes, the violence and the request for clemency
It is precisely on the history preceding the crime that part of the legal battle is now focused. In the 226-page clemency request submitted to the governor of Tennessee, Pike’s lawyers reconstructed a childhood marked by violence, sexual abuse and abandonment. The documentation presented by the defense refers to abuse that began when she was still very young, a rape suffered at 11 years old and another sexual assault at 17 years old. After entering prison she was also diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.
The defense claims that these elements, together with Pike’s age at the time of the murder, were not adequately evaluated in the proceedings that led to the capital punishment. In her application for clemency, Pike also expressed her remorse: “I was an 18-year-old girl with a mental illness. It took me years to understand the gravity of what I had done.”
However, Tennessee Republican Governor Bill Lee denied clemency on September 28. The next day the US Supreme Court also rejected an earlier request to stay the execution.
She would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in at least 200 years
Pike’s execution would also have had historical weight. Tennessee hasn’t put a woman to death in at least two centuries. Executions of women remain extremely rare even in the rest of the United States. Since the reinstatement of capital punishment in 1976, 18 have been executed, approximately 1% of the total number of people executed. The last was Amber McLaughlin, executed in Missouri in 2023.
Pike would also have represented a particular case due to his age at the time of the crime. According to documentation collected in his clemency request, in the modern era of the death penalty eight people in Tennessee have been sentenced to death for crimes committed at age 18: the convictions of the other seven were later overturned.
Colleen Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, spoke out in favor of the execution. For over thirty years, he explained, he has been waiting for the sentence handed down for his daughter’s murder to be carried out.
Now the matter is back in the hands of federal judges. The stop decided less than an hour after the lethal injection does not cancel Christa Pike’s death sentence, but it suspends the execution while the Court evaluates whether her past of violence and abuse was fully considered when it was decided that she should die.