The State of Tennessee is preparing to execute this week a woman sentenced to death for the murder of a fellow student when she was 18 years old. If the execution, planned for Wednesday, goes ahead, Christa Pike, now 50, will be the first woman to be put to death in the southeastern central United States state in more than two centuries.
The Tennessee Supreme Court last week denied a request by Pike to stay the execution. Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, a Republican, made the same decision with a clemency petition on Monday. Pike's lawyers then asked the US Supreme Court to postpone the execution, which on Tuesday rejected that request and a petition to review the case, leaving in place the execution scheduled for this Wednesday at the Riverbend maximum security prison in Nashville.
Pike was convicted of the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, with whom she was a student at a youth vocational training center in Knoxville, east Tennessee. Pike and two other young men, including her boyfriend at the time, Tadaryl Shipp, took Slemmer to a secluded location and killed her. The boyfriend, who was 17 years old, was sentenced to life in prison. The other person testified against both and was granted probation.
According to the Tennessee Supreme Court ruling, Pike told police that she believed Slemmer was trying to take her boyfriend away from her, and at first he just wanted to fight her, but ended up killing her.
According to the sentence, Pike had told a colleague the day before that he was going to kill Slemmer and admitted to the police that he hit, kicked and cut the throat of the young woman, who tried to escape several times from the attack, which lasted more than half an hour. Pike said he had hit Slemmer several times in the head with pieces of asphalt. Slemmer died from blows to the head, according to court documents.
Pike's lawyers have asked that the death penalty be replaced with life in prison without the possibility of parole, alleging that the woman suffered sexual abuse and mental health problems during her childhood and adolescence. According to the defense, the lawyers who represented Pike at trial did not show the jury evidence about the abuse she had suffered.
They also point out that in Tennessee the sentences of seven people, all men, sentenced to death for crimes they committed at age 18, have been annulled. No other person that age has been sentenced to death in the state since Pike, 30 years ago.
The history of abuses put forward by the defense
According to the clemency petition, Pike was a victim of sexual violence during her childhood and was assaulted between the ages of two and five by her grandmother's boyfriend.
At age 11, a neighbor raped her, and Pike allegedly told her mother, who did not believe her, according to a summary of the petition prepared by the Death Penalty Information Center (DPI). The neighbor was arrested on charges of indecent acts with a minor, but was not jailed. At age 17, she was raped again by a stranger, according to the petition. Pike was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.
In the clemency petition, Pike's attorneys noted that his mental health issues prevented him from “slowing down.” "I was an 18-year-old girl with a mental illness. It took me many years to even understand the seriousness of what I had done. And even longer to accept how many people I affected. I took the life of someone's daughter, sister, friend. Now it sickens me to think that I was capable of committing a crime like that," Pike said in the petition, according to the AP agency.
According to the DPI, new death sentences for crimes committed by people between the ages of 18 and 20 are rare in the American justice system. In 2005, in the case Roper v. Simmons, the US Supreme Court prohibited sentencing to death those who committed a crime when they were under 18 years of age. Since then only 58 convictions have been imposed for crimes committed before the age of 21. Between 2020 and 2025, these sentences represented 5% of new death sentences.
Victim's mother calls for execution
Slemmer's mother, May Martínez, has rejected a stay of execution and has said she will travel from Jacksonville, Florida, where she lives, to witness it. The woman has described her daughter as a happy young woman who liked skating and playing games with her family.
"[Colleen] is not with me. She is not with me every day, every hour, every minute," the mother said in an interview this month with a local network, in which she lamented that attention on the case has focused on Pike and has left her daughter in the background. “It's like Colleen never existed,” he said, adding that he hoped the execution would bring some peace to the family.
