State argued clemency would not insulate Pike from death sentence
May Martinez, the mother of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, plans to attend the scheduled Wednesday execution of Christa Gail Pike in Nashville holding her daughter’s photograph, according to a United Press International report. Martinez told the station she would not likely say anything to Pike. “I’ll hold Colleen’s picture up to remind her of what she did,” Martinez told WBIR-TV. Pike “never apologized — never even tried — or her family,” Martinez said.
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee issued a statement Monday saying he would not intervene after reviewing Pike’s clemency petition. “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 the statement.
If carried out, the execution would make Pike the first woman put to death by the state in 200 years and, according to UPI, the first person in modern U.S. death penalty history executed for a crime committed at age 18. She would also be the 19th woman put to death in the United States since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976.
Pike received the death sentence for the 1995 killing of Slemmer. According to court records cited by UPI, Pike, her then-boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp, and another young woman, Shadolla Peterson, lured Slemmer into a wooded area because Pike believed Slemmer was romantically interested in Shipp. The attackers forced Slemmer to remove her clothes, beat her and tortured her. She was repeatedly slashed with a knife. Pike admitted to hitting Slemmer in the head with asphalt, cutting her throat and taking a piece of her skull as a souvenir, court documents and testimony said. Shipp later told the court he had carved a pentagram into Slemmer’s chest.
Of the three defendants, only Pike received a death sentence. Shipp was 17 at the time of the killing and was therefore ineligible for capital punishment. Peterson testified against Pike and Shipp and was given probation.
Martinez said she has been waiting for the execution for more than 30 years, USA Today reported. “I just want Christa down so I can end it, relieve my daughter, so she finally can be resting,” Martinez told WBIR-TV in 2021. “There’s not a day goes by that I don’t think about Colleen or how she died and how rough it was.” “She’s not with me,” Martinez told Knoxville’s NBC 10 News of Colleen. “Every day, every hour, every minute, she’s gone.”
More than 100 women’s advocacy groups had lobbied Lee and state officials to halt the execution, arguing that carrying it out would constitute cruel and unusual punishment given Pike’s history of childhood sexual abuse. According to court filings cited by the advocates, Pike was sexually abused by her grandmother’s boyfriend from age 2 to 5. At age 11, she was raped by a neighbor; the neighbor pleaded no contest to related charges and served no prison time, and was allowed to return to a home near Pike’s family. When she was 17, she was raped by a stranger in North Carolina who was never caught.
In a court brief, the women’s advocates argued that when Pike is strapped down for the execution she will relive those rapes in her mind, making the punishment cruel and unusual. Pike’s lawyers also noted that she has thrombocytosis, a condition that causes her body to produce an excess of platelets and increases her risk of blood clots, and that she has unusually small veins — conditions her lawyers have argued could make lethal injection especially painful.
In her clemency petition, Pike wrote: “Think back to the worst mistake you made as a reckless teenager. Well, mine happened to be huge, unforgettable and ruined countless lives. I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid. … I took the life of someone’s child, sister, friend. It sickens me now to think I had the ability to commit such a crime.”
The state, in its response to the clemency petition, argued that the execution is legal. “Pike’s prior abuse and mental struggles are tragic to say the least,” the state document said. “But they are no cause to insulate her from a lawfully imposed and exhaustively reviewed death sentence that a jury of her peers imposed purely because of her own horrific conduct.”
The execution is scheduled to be carried out by lethal injection.