Tennessee Is About To Execute Its First Woman Since 1820

Unless Governor Bill Lee intervenes in the eleventh hour, Tennessee will put a woman to death for the first time in more than two centuries when Christa Gail Pike is executed by lethal injection on September 30 in Riverbend Maximum Security Institution at Nashville.Pike, now 50, has spent nearly three decades on death row for a killing so brutal that prosecutors told jurors she kept a piece of her victim’s skull as a souvenir.Earlier this month, her legal team filed a petition for clemency with Mr. Lee, asking him to commute her sentence to life without parole — a decision that, under Tennessee law, rests with him alone. The petition does not seek to erase what happened on that Knoxville hillside three decades ago, according to the attorney leading the effort.“Commuting her sentence to life without possibility of parole does not absolve her of her guilt,” the attorney representing Christa Pike, Kelly Gleason, tells The New York Sun. “To the contrary, it would continue to hold her accountable for the remainder of her natural life.”A Killing That Shocked KnoxvilleAccording to court records, Pike lured 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer to a wooded stretch of the University of Tennessee’s agricultural campus in January 1995. Ms. Pike had convinced herself that Slemmer was flirting with her boyfriend, TaDaryl Shipp. All three were enrolled together at the Knoxville Job Corps, a federal training program for low-income teenagers.The horrific attack that followed lasted almost an hour. Pike and Shipp were found to have slashed Slemmer with a box cutter, and as she begged them to stop, carved a pentagram into her chest. Then, when Slemmer tried to run, they caught her and dragged her back. Pike finished Slemmer off with a piece of asphalt then pocketed a fragment of her skull.A jury convicted Pike of first-degree murder in 1996, and she was sentenced to death at 20. Her codefendants fared far better. Shipp, 17 at the time and too young for the death penalty, was convicted of first-degree murder in 1997 and sentenced to life with the possibility of parole — a possibility the board denied at his first review hearing last October. His next review is set for 2031.A clinical professor at Cornell Law School and faculty director of the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide, Sandra Babcock, tells the Sun that gap in punishment is reason enough for Mr. Lee to act. “This disparity alone warrants reducing her sentence to life imprisonment,” she says. “And this could be done immediately.”A third teenager involved, Shadolla Peterson, stood lookout but turned state’s evidence. She pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact and got six years of probation.Pike was the only one of the three to face execution. If it goes forward on September 30, she’ll be the first woman Tennessee has put to death since 1820, when a woman recorded in state archives as Martin Eve was hanged for accessory to murder. She is the only person the state has executed since then for a crime committed at age 18, 19, or 20.One piece of the record has drawn far less attention than the crime itself, Ms. Gleason points out, is the failure of Pike’s previous attorney to plea out.“The Friday before Christa’s trial started, the District Attorney made a plea offer to her attorney to settle the case for life without possibility of parole,” Ms. Gleason says. “It is significant that the state believed that this was justice, to hold Christa accountable the rest of her life, until she dies in prison, for actions committed along with two other teenagers who did not face death by execution.”The lead trial counsel, William Talman, “spent very little time explaining the last-minute offer to Christa,” she adds.Ms. Gleason also argues that the jury that sentenced Pike never heard the full story. Court filings describe a childhood marked by prenatal alcohol exposure, resulting brain damage, and multiple rapes that went unpunished for years. Her trial lawyers had lined up a psychologist to testify about how that history shaped her state of mind the night Slemmer died — then pulled the expert on the eve of sentencing with no backup plan. That void in the record, Ms. Gleason says, is what she’s asking Mr. Lee to weigh. “The jury that sentenced Ms. Pike to death heard absolutely none of the evidence of horrific, documented rapes and sexual abuse she suffered as a child and teen,” she says. The petition itself doesn’t ask for a pardon. Rather, it describes Pike as accepting responsibility and expressing deep remorse for the killing and asks only that her sentence be commuted to life without parole since she was only eligible for the death penalty because she had already turned 18, unlike her male accomplice.Sixth Circuit Judge Jane Stranch flagged the arbitrariness of the age of adulthood in a 2019 ruling upholding the death penalty conviction, writing that while it is likely unconstitutional to sentence someone age 18 to death, the court had limits to its federal review of state criminal cases. The Supreme Court has held that both a defendant’s age and documented childhood abuse bear directly on “moral culpability,” Ms. Babcock says. “That did not happen in Christa’s case,” she concludes, calling Pike’s trial counsel “blatantly ineffective” for failing to raise either factor. A Fight Over How Pike Will DiePike’s lawyers spent the summer contesting the method of execution, challenging Tennessee’s lethal injection protocol after the state’s botched May attempt to execute Tony Carruthers, whose execution team could not establish an IV line after more than an hour of trying.Mr. Lee said earlier this year that lethal injections will continue on schedule and blamed the Carruthers’ failure on a hard-to-find vein not a problem with the drug protocol. A senior judge held a three-day hearing in August to determine whether Pike’s medical conditions put her at risk of a similarly botched execution. The judge found that the defense hadn’t proven she would suffer needlessly, and the Tennessee Supreme Court let the September 30 date stand. Pike’s record on death row, meanwhile, has not been clean. In August 2001, she strangled a fellow inmate, Patricia Jones, with a shoestring in an attack that nearly killed Jones; a jury convicted her of attempted first-degree murder in 2004. Pike’s attorneys now say years of treatment for bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder have brought about positive behavioral changes.Not everyone reviewing the case sees an unresolved miscarriage of justice. “These articles are all highly favorable to the defendant and say little about the crime. There must be more to the story, or it wouldn’t have reached this point,” the legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, Kent Scheidegger, tells the Sun.On the ineffective-counsel claims driving Pike’s appeals, Mr. Scheidegger notes that “death sentences are often overturned for exactly that reason. But this one was not.”“That is why I say there must be more to the story,” he surmises. “If multiple courts looked at this case and none of them found ineffective assistance of counsel, there must be pieces of the puzzle missing.”Women and the Death ChamberExecutions of women are exceedingly uncommon in America. Since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, only 18 women have been put to death nationwide, compared with more than 1,500 men, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Nearly 200 women have been convicted of first-degree murder in Tennessee since 1978 without a death sentence, according to Pike’s attorneys.Pike’s case stands out for more than its rarity, according to a group that opposes her execution. “Though Christa is not black, having her execution associated with that of Martin’s serves as another poignant reminder of the practice’s ties to racial violence,” the communications coordinator for Death Penalty Action, a national nonprofit that campaigns against capital punishment, Alli Sullivan, tells the Sun.Ms. Sullivan says the reaction Pike’s case has drawn also reflects gendered double standards rarely applied to men convicted of comparably brutal crimes. “Women are expected to be submissive, tender, and modest,” Ms. Sullivan says. “The crime that Christa committed challenges those qualities even more so than instances of men committing similar crimes,” pointing to sexual trauma that “began when she was just three years old.”The case, some legal scholars say, illustrates how differently the death penalty is treated at different stages of the legal process. Ultimately, it has gotten harder to be sentenced to death in the first place. However, once that sentence is handed down, it is exceedingly hard to undo.“It’s much more difficult now to get a death sentence, even where the crime is brutal, because, among other things, defense lawyers have gotten much better at telling the story and explaining the circumstances that lead someone to do the kind of thing that might otherwise merit a death sentence,” the professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, Austin Sarat, tells the Sun.Once a case reaches the appellate stage, he explains, courts grow far more reluctant to revisit the facts. “It’s very clear in her case that she did not have adequate counsel at every stage,” Mr. Sarat explains. “But appellate courts are really reluctant to intervene; they invoke procedural bars rather than revisiting the facts.”Mr. Sarat says while also largely out of the public eye, the views of victims’ families carry weight in final decisions.“Prosecutors often give a lot of weight to what victims’ families want when deciding whether to pursue a case, and governors consider it when deciding whether to grant clemency,” he tells the Sun. “So in that sense, the wishes of the victim’s family are always present in these decisions.”Slemmer’s mother has made her position known. “Justice has to serve. It cannot go on like this,” May Martinez told the local news last year after the state set Pike’s execution date. “I’m just hoping Tennessee does what they’re supposed to do.”Ms. Gleason points out that Pike’s fight continues in a separate appeal now before the Tennessee Supreme Court. Whatever the court decides, Ms. Gleason says, “Governor Lee is empowered to grant life without parole and extend mercy to Christa.” Mr. Lee’s office has not yet responded to the petition that sits on his desk.

Tennessee Is About To Execute Its First Woman Since 1820

Tennessee Is About To Execute Its First Woman Since 1820

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