Tennessee Is Days Away From Executing a Sexual Assault Victim

Christa Pike was sexually abused and raped from the time when she was a toddler until almost a year to the day before she was arrested in 1995 at age 18 for murdering fellow teenager Colleen Slemmer when the two attended a job training program for troubled youth in Knoxville.

Tennessee officials do not dispute these facts. “I think everybody in this courtroom wishes that those things had never happened to Ms. Pike,” Tennessee Attorney General’s Office lawyer Will Ayers acknowledged in his closing argument to a grueling three-day hearing last month about challenges to Pike’s execution scheduled for September 30. “I think we all wish that we were not here today and that she was not on death row.”

In a new approach, the state’s Supreme Court appointed Shelby County Senior Judge Mark Ward as a “special master” to hear the arguments by Pike’s defense team, including that lethal injection would be cruel and unusual because it could trigger traumatic memories, among other reasons.

“We’ve all heard of flashbacks,” said clinical psychologist Dr. Bethany Brand, who testified that such memories can “intrude so intensively that the person loses all awareness of where they actually are, and what’s happening, and they instead are reliving what they lived through already.” Brand interviewed Pike in 2023 and found the “level of trauma she was subjected to … is almost impossible to grasp because it is so severe.”

Experts in the field of trauma and sexual violence filed an amicus brief in the case arguing there is “substantial risk” that the execution would cause Pike to re-experience what she endured as a girl and teenager and “it will be as horrific for her now as it was then.”

“Once she is restrained and immobilized, a man will try to find a vein in Ms. Pike’s arm through which he will inject the poison that will kill her,” notes the brief. “If he cannot find a vein in her arm, the expectation is that he will attempt to inject the poison near her groin.”

But a week after the hearing, Ward concluded Pike’s team had “failed” to prove she would face “needless suffering,” or could “avoid mental suffering” if the state used any other method besides lethal injection.

If the justices agree with Ward’s “findings,” then Pike’s lawyers say they will appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. They have also submitted a clemency petition to Republican Gov. Bill Lee, asking him to commute her sentence to life in prison without parole, noting that Pike’s life of abuse went unad­dressed by the adults and state sys­tems meant to pro­tect her, and she has accepted responsibility for her crime and expressed deep remorse. Otherwise, she will be the first woman Tennessee executes in over 200 years, and the last person sentenced to death in the state for a crime committed at such a young age, the petition states.

“There is an inability to hold simultaneously in our minds that this person not only inflicted suffering but is someone who is herself suffering, and that is what we really need to do to understand this case,” Sandra Babcock, faculty director and founder of the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide, told Truthout. “It’s not to erase the suffering of either Colleen Slemmer or Christa Pike. It is to recognize that Christa, in addition to being a perpetrator, was herself a victim.”

Authorities in West Virginia first failed to help Pike after being alerted to her suffering as an elementary school student when a teacher called her parents but failed to alert authorities when she drew a man with a “huge penis and demon face.” At age 11, she was raped by a man who pled “no contest” to a reduced charge, then faced abuse from her mother’s boyfriends in her own home. After lashing out and abusing drugs, she was sent to juvenile detention centers in North Carolina where her former attorney Matthew Martin, now a judge, testified he and others “failed her” when she should have instead “had services wrapped around her.” Not long after she returned home, she was raped at age 17.

To find a new start, Pike attended a job training program in Knoxville, Tennessee, but she fell into a relationship with 17-year-old Tadaryl Shipp, who had a history of violence and abusive behavior. Pike thought Slemmer was trying to “steal” her boyfriend, and they lured her to the woods and brutally murdered her. It was Shipp who later testified he carved a pentagram into Slemmer’s chest, but given his youth, he was convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder, and received a life sentence with the possibility of parole. Pike’s attorneys, on the other hand, failed to advise her to avoid a salacious trial in Knox County by accepting a last-minute offer of life without parole. They also failed to present her youth or her history of traumatic sexual assaults as mitigating factors that could have reduced her punishment, and she was sentenced to death.

In her study of the 48 cis women on death row in the United States between 1990 and 2022, Babcock found almost all were “sentenced to a large extent, if not directly, because of their gender and experiences of gender oppression that affected their lives and shaped their behavior.”

Pike was 19 years old when she was convicted in 1996 and became the only woman on Tennessee’s death row. She spent the next nearly three decades in a cell the size of a parking space for 22-23 hours a day.

“She was not doing well at all when we first started our representation in 2021,” recalled Angie Bergman, an attorney with Bass, Berry & Sims, who helped challenge Pike’s prolonged solitary confinement. In 2024, they won a settlement for Pike to receive the same opportunities as men on death row to work and eat with others within her pod. By then, the state had set Pike’s execution date.

Bergman counseled Pike during the August hearing when she had to listen to detailed testimony about her abuse and how tortuous her potential execution would be. “It is difficult for me to understand as a person that this is a choice that we have made as a society to take pain and to multiply it,” Bergman told Truthout. “Being able to walk through this with Christa has really brought that home.”

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, none of the 18 women executed since 1972, when the death penalty was reinstated, were under 21 years old at the time of their offense. No women have been sentenced to death for offenses committed under the age of 21 since 2005, when the U.S. Supreme Court banned death sentences for people under age 18.

Tennessee resumed executions last year after Governor Lee paused them in 2022 over concerns the state was using expired lethal injection drugs. Byron Black, one of the first men to be killed with the revised protocol in 2025, exclaimed, “Oh, it’s hurting so bad” during his execution. In May 2026, the attending physician who killed Black struggled for more than an hour to find a vein as he attempted to execute Tony Carruthers. Maria DeLiberato, a senior counsel with the ACLU’s capital punishment project, called what she witnessed “barbaric.” While Governor Lee granted Carruthers a one-year reprieve, his defense team wants the governor to pause executions again.

The attending physician for the troubled executions is Dr. Mark Walton Fowler, whose essays are frequently featured on the right-wing website The Patriot Post. He said in a statement that people “condemned to die are treated with utmost courtesy, respect and professionalism by staff.” This same doctor confirmed he will oversee Pike’s execution.

As the days until her death date dwindle, Pike’s case has drawn increasing attention. A new true crime series Sinclair Broadcast Group launched recently called Dead Woman Walking: Pike vs. Tennessee includes an interview with Pike in which she asks Tennessee “to allow me to live out the rest of my natural life inside of their penal facilities” where she has become a mentor to others.

On September 18, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights urged the United States to refrain from executing Pike, echoing a panel of experts who reviewed the case and urged them to act. “Viewed cumulatively and in light of her individual vulnerabilities, Pike’s proposed execution violates the absolute prohibition of torture and other forms of ill-treatment,” the experts wrote.

Babcock lamented to Truthout that “cruelty and violence are increasingly seen as normal.” She also recalled a wave of executions during the final days of the first Trump administration that included the only woman on federal death row, Lisa Montgomery, who committed her crime “while in the grip of a psychotic episode” after enduring relentless torture, rape, and sex trafficking.

“In Lisa’s case, as in Christa’s case, the mitigating circumstances were so powerful. But the president disregarded them,” said Babcock. “I’m hopeful that Christa’s case will have a different outcome.”

Pike’s clemency petition, which asks Governor Lee to commute her sentence even if the state Supreme Court does not, features the comment made by the Tennessee Attorney General’s Office lawyer — that everybody wishes “she was not on death row.”

“There’s a reason it’s on the cover of the petition,” Kelly Gleason, a member of Pike’s post-conviction defense team, told Truthout.