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Christa Pike, a woman on Tennessee’s death row, faces execution this week after Governor Bill Lee denied her clemency request. Pike was convicted of the 1995 murder of fellow student Colleen Slemmer while both attended a job training program in Knoxville. Her legal team has spent years arguing that critical evidence about her traumatic childhood was never presented to the jury that sentenced her to death.
A Childhood Defined by Abuse and Neglect
Pike’s lawyers say she endured years of sexual and physical abuse beginning when she was a toddler. Her mother’s boyfriends and other men molested her from a young age. She struggled in school and moved between family members in West Virginia and North Carolina. At 17, just one year before the murder, she reported to North Carolina police that a man threw her to the ground and raped her. No one was ever arrested for that attack.
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Three years ago, trauma psychologist Bethany Brand reviewed Pike’s case at the request of her legal team. Brand examined police reports, medical records and case files. She concluded that the adults in Pike’s life had consistently failed her. Doctors only diagnosed a bipolar disorder several years after she had already entered prison. “The level of trauma Pike was subjected to is almost impossible to grasp because it is so severe,” Brand wrote in her final report.
Brand told NBC News that medication in prison has helped Pike significantly. She said Pike now shows “empathy and great regret” for what she did. However, Brand also stressed that Pike’s case highlights the urgent need for greater awareness of women’s mental health, trauma recognition and untreated mental illness. “In Christa’s case, nobody was trying to get her help,” Brand said.
Supreme Court Appeal and Execution Concerns
Pike’s lawyers have asked the Supreme Court to halt the execution. They argue that being restrained and strapped to a gurney will likely cause her “severe mental suffering and superadded psychological terror” because of her post-traumatic stress disorder. The state has not denied that Pike suffered abuse. However, the attorney general’s office said a judge already determined last month that it was “speculative whether Pike would suffer” greater psychological harm from the lethal injection process.
The Supreme Court represents Pike’s last realistic chance at a reprieve. Governor Lee said he upheld her death sentence “after deliberate consideration.” Her lawyers responded Monday, saying they were “saddened and heartbroken” by his decision.
Unequal Outcomes Among Co-Conspirators
Pike’s legal team also points to significant disparities in how the three people involved in the crime were sentenced. Pike received the death penalty for first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. Her boyfriend at the time, Tadaryl Shipp, was 17 years old. Because he was a juvenile, he received a life sentence and remains eligible for parole. Shipp later testified at a post-conviction hearing that he was the one who carved a pentagram into Slemmer’s chest.
The third accomplice, Shadolla Peterson, who was 18 at the time, served as a lookout. She received probation in exchange for her cooperation with prosecutors. In addition, Pike’s lawyers argue that her original legal representatives could have accepted a prosecution offer of life without parole in exchange for a guilty plea. That option was never taken.
Pike’s lawyers further argue that her age at the time of the crime would carry more legal weight today. Scientific research has since advanced considerably in showing that young people’s brains continue developing well beyond their teenage years. Pike told police she “wasn’t even thinking” during the assault and said she had been jealous, believing Slemmer was trying to take Shipp’s attention away from her.
The Victim’s Family and the Weight of the Crime
Colleen Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, remains unconvinced that Pike has genuinely changed. Martinez described the lasting pain of the aftermath. After the investigation ended, she did not initially realize that some of her daughter’s body parts had been retained as trial evidence. She later had to collect Slemmer’s skull from the courthouse. The medical examiner’s office mailed her other remains afterward. The office noted it rarely retains human remains today because of improved technology, photography and laboratory methods.
Pike has acknowledged her role in the killing. She sobbed when the judge sentenced her to death by electrocution, which was then Tennessee’s only method of execution before the state moved to lethal injection. She pleaded through tears to hug her mother. Early in her prison term, she struggled to express remorse. “It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I’d done,” Pike wrote in her clemency petition. Another woman, Gaile Owens, was previously on Tennessee’s death row alongside Pike until 2010, when Governor Phil Bredesen commuted her sentence to life in prison. Pike has not received the same consideration.
