Tennessee Set to Execute Christa Pike
First Woman Put to Death in the State Since 1820
Unless a court or the governor intervenes in the coming hours, Tennessee will execute Christa Pike on Wednesday, September 30, the first woman the state has put to death in more than two centuries, and the closing of one of America's most debated death-penalty cases.
The Case
Pike, now 50, was 18 years old in 1995 when she and her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, then 17, were convicted in the torture and killing of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a classmate at the Knoxville Job Corps center. The crime's brutality, Slemmer was stabbed, slashed, and beaten over an extended period in a wooded area, and a fragment of her skull was later found in Pike's pocket, made it one of the most notorious murder cases in modern Tennessee history.
Pike was sentenced to death. Shipp, a juvenile at the time of the crime, received life imprisonment with the possibility of parole, a split outcome that remains part of the case's contested legacy.
Pike does not deny her guilt. She has spent three decades as the only woman on Tennessee's death row.
The Execution and Its History
Pike is scheduled to die by lethal injection at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. If the execution proceeds, it will be Tennessee's first execution of a woman since 1820, a gap of more than 200 years. (Court filings by Pike's attorneys note that the historical record for the 1820 case, an execution recorded under the name Eve Martin, contains discrepancies; historians cited by NPR treat the date as the accepted reference point regardless.)
The Tennessee Supreme Court recently denied a stay of execution, and Governor Bill Lee has denied clemency, clearing the final procedural hurdles.
The Opposition
Pike's lawyers and a coalition of supporters, including anti-death-penalty advocates who marched at the state Capitol in Nashville on Sunday, argue the execution is a disproportionate punishment. Their case rests on three pillars: her age at the time of the crime (18, barely an adult under the law), documented severe mental illness, and a childhood marked by exceptional abuse and trauma.
Courts have repeatedly rejected those arguments on the merits, and the state has proceeded on the principle that the jury's sentence, upheld through decades of appeals, should be carried out. Supporters of the execution note the brutality of the crime and the length of the legal process, three decades of litigation, as evidence the sentence is neither arbitrary nor hasty.
A Wider Context
The execution arrives amid a broader American retreat from capital punishment, executions have fallen dramatically from their 1990s peak, and public support is at multi-decade lows, yet it also reflects the persistence of the death penalty in a handful of Southern states, where most U.S. executions now occur.
The reference in recent coverage to the death at 102 of Frances Smith, an Alabama woman who famously escaped the death penalty eight times before her sentence was eventually commuted and who died this month of natural causes, has become a frequent point of comparison for death-penalty opponents, who note that even the most storied capital cases can end without an execution.
Pike's case has drawn international attention for the same reason it has divided Tennesseans: it tests whether the death penalty's machinery, designed overwhelmingly for men, and applied to crimes decades old, can fairly be applied to an abused, mentally ill teenager's crime three decades after the fact. The state's answer, absent last-minute intervention, comes Wednesday.