Slemmer’s mother wants execution so daughter ‘finally can be resting’
Attorneys for Christa Pike have petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to halt her scheduled execution by lethal injection Wednesday, arguing that proceeding would place Tennessee on “singular footing” and ignore what “both science and our legal system have decided” about adolescent brain development. In a Monday statement, attorneys Stephen Ferrell, Kelly Gleason and Randy Spivey said Governor Bill Lee’s denial of Pike’s clemency request “leaves unanswered vital questions about Tennessee’s execution protocol.”
Governor Bill Lee denied Pike’s clemency request earlier in the day, upholding the sentence after what he described as “deliberate consideration” and a “thorough review of the case.” “After deliberate consideration of Christa Gail Pike’s request for clemency, and after a thorough review of the case, I am upholding the sentence of the State of Tennessee and do not plan to intervene,” Lee said in a statement. Pike’s legal team had filed the clemency petition earlier this month, requesting that her death sentence be commuted to life in prison.
“With this decision, the State of Tennessee is ignoring what both science and our legal system have decided: an 18-year-old brain is not an adult brain, and 18 is too young to face execution,” the attorneys said in the Monday statement. Moving ahead with Pike’s execution would place Tennessee “on singular footing,” they added, because she would be the first person the state “executes in the modern death penalty era who was a teenager at the time of the offence.”
If the execution proceeds, Pike would be the first woman put to death in Tennessee in more than 200 years. Only 18 women have been executed in the United States since the 1970s, compared with 1,663 men.
Pike was 18 when she and her then-boyfriend, 17-year-old Tadaryl Shipp, beat, tortured and murdered 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer at a job training camp for troubled teens in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1995. The killing created a media frenzy locally after Slemmer’s body was found with a pentagram — a symbol of Satanic ritual — carved into her chest. Pike had accused Slemmer of insulting her and trying to steal her boyfriend. Two other residents at the camp later testified that Pike had bragged about the murder before and after, and showed them a piece of Slemmer’s skull.
A year later, Pike was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. Shipp, who was 17 at the time of the killing, received a life sentence with the possibility of parole. According to the Tennessee Department of Corrections, the 21-year-old Pike was the youngest person on death row at the time of her incarceration. Pike is scheduled to be executed September 30 after years of failed appeals.
Slemmer’s mother has insisted she wants the execution to proceed so that her daughter “finally can be resting.”
Pike’s lawyers said she has a documented history of childhood sexual abuse, abandonment and neglect, and argued that if she were convicted of the same crime today as a teenager she would not receive a death sentence. “The 18-year-old girl suffering from severe mental illness and near-debilitating trauma no longer exists,” her attorneys said. “Christa is a 50-year-old remorseful woman who understands her actions, receives proper treatment for her mental illness, and provides for and guides fellow incarcerated women.” In the years since her sentencing, her defense team said they have uncovered details about her childhood that they say the jury never had the chance to consider.