Inside the Final Days of a Woman on Death Row

May Martinez is packing her car for a drive she has waited nearly 33 years to make — from her home in Jacksonville, Florida, to a death chamber in Nashville, where she intends to watch the woman who murdered her daughter, Colleen Slemmer, breathe her last.In less than a week, at 10 a.m. on September 30, the state of Tennessee will strap Christa Gail Pike, 50, to a gurney inside the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution and pump her veins full of pentobarbital until her heart stops beating, unless Governor Bill Lee steps in.If the execution goes forward as scheduled, Ms. Pike will die as the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than two centuries — and the 19th woman put to death nationwide since the Supreme Court restored the death penalty in 1976.Only a handful of witnesses are permitted by law to watch it happen. This month, the Tennessee Department of Correction named seven mostly local journalists to the media gallery, with one standing by as an alternate. How long the death will take is unclear. When Tennessee first used its single-drug pentobarbital protocol on Oscar Smith in May 2025, seven minutes passed between the injection and his declared death.In court testimony reviewing 30 pentobarbital executions in other states, a Davidson County medical examiner found all had been declared dead within 30 minutes of the first injection. However, death row plaintiffs challenging the protocol have pointed to records showing measurable heart activity can persist for 34 minutes to over an hour past that point, even after a person has been pronounced dead.The countdown began a year ago, when the Tennessee Supreme Court set September 30 as the date for Pike’s execution, punishment for the 1995 torture-murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a fellow student in the Knoxville Job Corps program whom Pike and two accomplices lured into the woods and killed.Since then, Ms. Pike’s legal team has tried nearly every avenue left to an inmate who has already exhausted her direct appeals — and, one by one, those avenues have closed.“It is extremely unlikely Ms. Pike would be sentenced to death if she were tried today,” the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, Robin Maher, tells The New York Sun.Ms. Pike’s case unfolded during a moment of national panic over juvenile crime and “satanism,” a climate that left little room for understanding how childhood trauma and sexual abuse shape a teenager’s mental health and brain development, according to a clinical professor at Cornell Law School specializing in death penalty defense.“Christa’s case is emblematic of an earlier era,” Sandra Babcock tells The New York Sun.Ms. Pike’s attorneys point to a 2022 Tennessee Supreme Court ruling, State v. Booker, which struck down mandatory life sentences for defendants under 18 because adolescent brain science makes them categorically less culpable — reasoning her team has argued should not stop at a defendant’s 18th birthday.Such a reprieve, however, has not been granted, and time is running out.So what, exactly, do Christa Pike’s last days look like from the inside, and what is happening from the legal front behind-the-scenes as Tennessee counts down to an execution it has not carried out on a woman in more than two centuries?The Last AppealsOn the appeals end, Ms. Pike’s defense is not coming out of the state’s pocket, and it is not a last-minute scramble, either. Rather, it is the end stretch of a case her lawyers have been building for years.Federal Defender Services of Eastern Tennessee, a nonprofit funded by the U.S. court system rather than the state trying to execute her, brought the federal court challenge to Tennessee’s execution protocol; attorney Kelly Gleason filed her clemency petition separately. Both are now racing the same September 30 deadline.In January, Ms. Pike’s attorneys sued the state in Davidson County Chancery Court, arguing that Tennessee’s newly adopted execution protocol — a single dose of pentobarbital, replacing the old three-drug formula — would cause her needless suffering because of a blood-clotting disorder that makes her veins difficult to access, and because her Buddhist faith forbids participating in the process of her own death.The Tennessee Supreme Court appointed a special master, Senior Judge Mark Ward, who spent three days in August hearing testimony from medical experts, prison officials and a clinical psychologist about Ms. Pike’s physiology and her history of childhood sexual abuse and post-traumatic stress.Ms. Pike’s clemency petition documents a childhood her lawyers describe as marked by repeated sexual abuse beginning at age two and a rape at 11 by a neighbor who was later convicted; the Tennessee Attorney General’s Office has told the court it does not dispute that history.The special master was not persuaded. His report concluded that Ms. Pike’s legal team had failed to prove she faced a substantial risk of pain, serious illness or needless suffering under the state’s protocol. The court did, however, grant one concession: citing Ms. Pike’s trauma history, it shortened her transfer from the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center — where she has spent nearly three decades — to Riverbend’s Capital Punishment Unit, moving that window from the 48 hours called for under the protocol down to 24 hours or less, by agreement with the Tennessee Department of Correction. She will also be permitted to have a Buddhist spiritual adviser present in the death chamber.Separately, a 14-day isolation period under the current protocol began last Wednesday, September 16. For Ms. Pike, that has meant the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center moved every other female inmate out of her pod; she is now its sole occupant, watched by two officers at all times, Ms. Gleason says. Male death row inmates undergo a comparable observation ritual, but at Riverbend itself, where they are moved into a pod that otherwise sits empty except for programming and activities.The 14-day figure is new. Under the prior protocol, condemned inmates were isolated for 72 hours before execution. Ms. Pike’s federal defenders, Steve Ferrell and Luke Ihnen, have argued to the Tennessee Supreme Court that the extended isolation is cruel and unusual — pointing also to what they call an arbitrary disparity: an inmate who elects the electric chair is isolated for only three days under the same protocol.The unit ordinarily holds Tennessee’s male death row inmates during the final phase of death watch, in cells adjoining the chamber itself. Ms. Pike, the state’s only female death row inmate, will be the first woman ever housed there. Once she arrives, she will be its sole occupant, and the state has agreed that female corrections officers will transport and observe her, an accommodation tied to her history of sexual trauma.Seven media witnesses and one alternate were chosen this month through a formal drawing conducted under Tennessee Department of Correction rules; they will watch from a small viewing room adjoining the chamber, separated from it by a blind that rises once the process begins, the same setup used for every execution carried out at Riverbend.The state’s own death-watch rules, applied to every condemned inmate before her, offer a picture of what those final hours typically look like: a cell under round-the-clock observation, non-contact visits with anyone on an approved list until the day before execution, no media interviews, and a special meal, of which the state allots roughly $20 toward it, delivered the night before and eaten by midnight.Ms. Pike will then be woken at 5.30 a.m., roughly four and a half hours before the execution takes place. She is said to be suffering nightmares and extreme terror as the day approaches. As for last-minute visitors, it appears Ms. Pike has almost no relatives left to see her.Ms. Pike’s attorney, Ms. Gleason, tells the Sun that her mother died of cancer last November and her stepfather — the man she considered her real father — died this past March; the two of them were the only relatives who visited her regularly. Ms. Pike’s biological father died of cancer a few years before that.Inside the WallsIn the meantime, how Tennessee actually carries out an execution has drawn its own scrutiny over the past sixteen months.Byron Black, executed by lethal injection at Riverbend in August 2025, sighed, groaned and appeared to be in pain as the drug took effect, according to witnesses.Even those who support capital punishment should question what it means for the state to execute a survivor of child rape using an execution team that has botched an attempted execution in the very recent past, Ms. Babcock underscores.“Experts have said that Christa is very likely to relive the most terrifying moments of her earlier rapes as she is being put to death,” she tells the Sun. “That should disturb any person with a conscience.”Still, nine months after Mr. Black’s death, the state’s attempt to execute Tony Carruthers collapsed entirely. Execution staff spent just over an hour failing to establish IV access, repeatedly puncturing him, before Governor Lee intervened and granted a one-year reprieve.A subsequent review found the department had failed to properly test lethal injection drugs for endotoxins before seven prior executions and had halted an eighth for the same reason.Whether the injection causes pain is genuinely contested. Pentobarbital is meant to induce a fatal coma quickly, and the state maintains a person loses consciousness within moments. However, a 2020 review of more than 200 lethal-injection autopsies found 84 percent showed pulmonary edema — fluid filling the lungs, which experts have likened to drowning or waterboarding.Meanwhile, Ms. Pike will be under close surveillance in her final days and hours. She will be kept isolated, mostly as a precaution to prevent suicide, according to someone who spent time on Tennessee’s death row documenting it firsthand.“Close monitoring and a cold politeness,” the professor at New York Law School and a nationally known expert on the death penalty, Robert Blecker, tells the Sun of what he witnessed.He sat for several hours with inmate Daryl Holton during Holton’s own death watch, before Holton was executed in Tennessee’s electric chair in September 2007 for shooting his four children to death during a custody dispute in 1997.Mr. Blecker is careful to note the account is specific to one man, not a prediction for Ms. Pike. Mr. Holton, he says, had waived his own appeals and asked to die, a temperament he describes as unusually composed for death watch.Around Riverbend, the prison where Ms. Pike will spend her final hours and where the execution itself will take place, the ritual of protest is already underway.Opponents of the death penalty, under the banner of “March for Mercy,” plan to walk roughly nine miles from Riverbend to the state capitol the Sunday before the execution — the same route organizers used ahead of Darrell Hines’s execution last month and before nearly every Tennessee execution in recent years.For now, Ms. Pike remains at the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center in Nashville, the facility that has held her for most of her three decades on death row.A Mother’s Wait, a Governor’s SilenceAs of this week, however, Governor Lee has not announced a decision on clemency, and his office has given no public timeline. Ms. Gleason, tells the Sun the clemency petition asks the governor to hold Ms. Pike accountable by having her spend the rest of her life in prison without parole, rather than to be executed, and that there is no indication of when Mr. Lee will rule. Amnesty International has issued a worldwide appeal urging members to press Mr. Lee to commute Ms. Pike’s sentence, describing her case, as reflecting “widespread and systemic failures that surface in death penalty cases.”Others contend that the real victim, Colleen Slemmer, has been lost in the push to spare Ms. Pike’s life.Ms. Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, wants no part of clemency. She has said on social media that she supports the courts’ rejection of Ms. Pike’s lethal injection challenge and plans to make the roughly 590-mile drive from her home in Jacksonville, Florida to Nashville ahead of the execution.“I would feel better that she felt the same pain that Colleen did,” Ms. Martinez told a Knoxville television station this month. “She did the crime. I think she should pay for it.”This week, Ms. Martinez posted childhood photographs of her daughter and on Monday wished her slain daughter a “Happy Heavenly Birthday.”“Everything in me broke the moment my child died,” Martinez wrote. “A mother will never get over losing her child.”

Inside the Final Days of a Woman on Death Row

Inside the Final Days of a Woman on Death Row

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