Tennessee governor denies clemency for Christa Pike, clearing way for first female execution in 200 years

Tennessee is scheduled to execute Christa Gail Pike by lethal injection at 10 a.m. Wednesday, a death that would make her the first woman put to death by the state in more than 200 years. Governor Bill Lee announced Monday that he would not intervene, clearing the last political avenue for clemency a day before the execution is set to proceed at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.

"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 Monday, ending a clemency campaign that Pike's legal team had pressed for weeks.

The decision came days after the Tennessee Supreme Court rejected Pike's final state-court appeals, which had argued that the state's three-drug lethal injection protocol risked causing psychological terror and that her case should be reconsidered in light of her age at the time of the crime. Pike's attorneys, Kelly Gleason and Stephen Ferrell, said they were "deeply disappointed" by that ruling and would seek an emergency stay from the U.S. Supreme Court, a filing expected in the final hours before the execution.

The numbers

Tennessee has not executed a woman since 1820, according to the state's own capital punishment chronology maintained by the Department of Correction. If it proceeds, Pike's execution would end a 206-year gap and make her only the 19th woman executed in the United States since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, out of more than 1,600 executions carried out nationwide in that period, according to figures compiled by the Death Penalty Information Center.

Women make up roughly 2 percent of the more than 9,000 people sentenced to death since 1976, and only three women nationally have received new death sentences in the past five years, the center's data show. Pike, now 50, is also the only person Tennessee has executed in the modern death-penalty era for a crime committed at 18, 19 or 20; the seven other Tennesseans sentenced to death for offenses committed in that age range have all had their sentences vacated or reduced. She has spent 30 years on death row, longer than she had been alive at the time of the killing.

How the case reached this point

Pike was 18 and enrolled at a federal Job Corps vocational program in Knoxville in January 1995 when she, her boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp, then 17, and a third student, Shadolla Peterson, lured 19-year-old classmate Colleen Slemmer to a wooded area on the University of Tennessee's agriculture campus. The three beat and tortured Slemmer for more than an hour; Pike struck her with a piece of asphalt and kept a fragment of her skull afterward, and Shipp carved a pentagram into her chest. Slemmer died of her injuries.

Peterson, who did not participate directly in the killing, testified against her co-defendants and received probation. Shipp, tried as a juvenile because he was 17, was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole. Pike alone was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death in 1996, becoming the youngest woman on Tennessee's death row.

Her appeals over three decades focused heavily on evidence that was not presented at her original trial: documented prenatal exposure to alcohol that defense experts say caused lasting brain damage affecting impulse control, childhood poverty, repeated sexual assaults, and drug dependence beginning around age 12. A defense psychologist, Bethany Brand, who evaluated Pike more recently, said in case filings that "nobody was trying to get her help" as a teenager and that Pike now shows "empathy and great regret" for the killing. Her attorney, Randall Spivey, has argued that understanding her history "will not justify her actions that night," but shows "Christa was broken, not evil."

Who is affected

Colleen Slemmer's mother, May Martinez, has said she intends to be present as an official witness Wednesday. She has said she plans to hold a photograph of her daughter during the procedure.

"I will sit there with her picture in my hand, and as she gets hooked up to a needle to go to sleep, she can look at the picture," Martinez has said of her decision to witness the execution.

The Tennessee Department of Correction has confirmed the selection of official media witnesses for the execution, chosen from applications submitted by Tennessee news organizations under the state's statutory witness requirements. The department's earlier advisory on witness applications laid out the process by which media and other statutorily authorized witnesses were credentialed in the weeks leading up to the execution.

Advocates for people with fetal alcohol spectrum disorders and death-penalty opponents have pointed to Pike's case nationally as a test of how courts weigh undiagnosed neurological and psychiatric harm in capital sentencing decided decades ago, before such evidence was as routinely developed at trial.

Reaction

Pike, in a letter shared through her spiritual adviser, the Rev. Mikey Noechel, and reported by NBC News, wrote: "Whether my clemency is granted or not, I am at peace." She said she was "not afraid to die," adding, "I'm only nervous about the process," and told correspondents she had received "more love in the last two weeks than I have my entire life."

Noechel, who has ministered to Pike on death row, said he does not minimize the crime. "She did something terrible. Awful. I hate that it happened and I feel deep compassion for Colleen Slemmer's family," he said. "But Christa is proof that redemption and change are possible."

Prosecutors and state officials have defended the sentence as consistent with the jury's original verdict and with subsequent review by state and federal courts over three decades of appeals. Lee's office, in declining to intervene, did not elaborate beyond its written statement upholding the sentence.

What happens next

Barring a last-minute stay from the U.S. Supreme Court or a reversal by Lee, the execution is set to proceed at 10 a.m. CDT Wednesday, September 30, at Riverbend, according to CBS News' reporting on the case. Pike's attorneys said they would continue pursuing emergency federal appeals up to the scheduled time, though such filings have rarely succeeded in halting Tennessee executions in recent years. If carried out, it would be Tennessee's first execution of a woman in the modern death-penalty era and the state's first execution of any kind involving a female inmate since 1820, according to WSMV's account of the state's execution history.

State officials have said the execution will be carried out under the same protocol used in Tennessee's other recent lethal injections, and prison officials have said Pike will be permitted visits from her spiritual adviser and legal team in her final hours. The Department of Correction has not indicated any plan to delay the proceeding.