Tennessee plans execution of Christa Pike, first woman since 1819

Trial counsel declined to present mitigating evidence, Denno says

Tennessee has scheduled the execution of Christa Pike for September 30, 2026, which would be the state’s first execution of a woman since 1819, according to Austin Sarat, associate dean of the faculty and William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, writing in The Guardian. She would be the third person Tennessee has brought to the death chamber this year, one of whose executions was stopped after it was botched, Sarat wrote. Seventeen other people have been put to death in the state since 1960, he wrote, none of them women.

In all of U.S. history, only 578 women have been executed, a little more than 3% of the country’s total, according to Sarat. The most recent was Amber McLaughlin, killed in Missouri in 2024.

Pike had a childhood characterized by rape and abuse; when not subjected to such treatment, she was abandoned and neglected by her parents, Sarat wrote. She turned to violence and, with two others, committed a murder while still a teenager. Psychologist and trauma expert Bethany Brand was quoted as saying: “At 18 years old, her immature, traumatized brain made her exceptionally vulnerable to impulses and extremely poor decisions … Unmedicated and untreated, she was not able to put the ‘brakes on’ her bipolar- and trauma-triggered emotions.”

At trial, Pike’s lawyer failed to present mitigating evidence that was readily available to him and did not uncover new mitigating circumstances, according to The Guardian. Professor Deborah Denno was quoted as saying: “Specifically, counsel chose not to present defendant’s social history evidence … claiming that the … materials in particular contained double-edged information” — that is, information that might have hurt as well as helped her.

As Pike awaits execution, she has raised concerns that, given her distinctive medical and emotional problems, the state’s attempt to kill her could result in a torturous and cruel death, Sarat wrote. Courts have so far declined to intervene on those grounds, he said.

Women commit about one in eight homicides in the United States but tend to commit murders that fall below the threshold that prosecutors, judges and jurors consider the worst of the worst, Sarat wrote. Professor Elizabeth Rappaport was quoted as saying: “Two thirds of women who kill, kill family members and lovers … [and] [t]hese crimes almost never result in death sentences, regardless of the sex of the killer.” Pike was not one of those killers, Sarat wrote, and her victim was murdered in a gruesome manner. A local television station in Knoxville, Tennessee, reported that prosecutors claim Pike “tortured and killed” her victim because Pike believed the victim was trying to steal Pike’s boyfriend.

Sarat compared Pike’s crime to the 1983 killing committed by Karla Faye Tucker in Texas, in which Tucker and her co-defendant killed their victims with a pickaxe. Tucker underwent a religious conversion on death row; Texas Public Radio reported that her case attracted the attention of America’s top televangelists, including Pat Robertson, who appealed to then-Gov. George W. Bush to commute Tucker’s sentence, a request Bush refused. Tucker was put to death in 1998, making her the first woman executed in Texas since 1863.

In January 2021, the federal government under Donald Trump executed Lisa Montgomery. In 2004, Montgomery crossed state lines “ostensibly to purchase a puppy from Bobbie Jo Stinnett, a 23-year-old dog breeder who was eight months pregnant. Instead, Montgomery strangled her, cut her fetus from her womb and tried to pass the surviving baby off as her own,” according to The Guardian. Montgomery, like Pike, “had brain damage and severe mental illness that was exacerbated by a lifetime of abuse, including child sex trafficking, gang rape and physical abuse largely at the hands of family members,” the article said. She was killed by lethal injection, the fourth woman ever executed by the federal government, which first executed a woman in 1865 when it hanged Mary Surratt for her role in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

According to the National Museum of Women’s History, “most people, including the military judges who issued the guilty verdict, could not believe the United States government was going to execute a woman.” Sarat wrote that some of that sentiment is reflected in coverage of Pike’s case, arguing that even as society seeks to achieve gender equality, something remains unsettling about the prospect of putting a woman to death.

Sarat wrote that what should be unsettling in Pike’s case is not her gender but the prospect of putting to death someone whose crime was as much the product of society’s failure as of her criminal intent. “For women as well as men, capital punishment offers no solution to the problems that give rise to the most serious crimes,” he wrote.