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A Tennessee convict who has spent more than three decades on death row is scheduled to be put to death by lethal injection this week, a first for the state in more than 200 years and one that will once again put the American death penalty's treatment of women in the spotlight.
Christa Pike, 50, is due to be executed on Wednesday 30 September. If the sentence is carried out, she will become the first woman executed in Tennessee since the 19th century — a distinction she neither sought nor, her lawyers insist, deserves. Her defence team has filed a 226-page clemency petition asking the state to halt the procedure and commute her sentence to life imprisonment, and UN human rights experts have added their voices to the appeal, urging an immediate halt.
The case has also drawn fresh attention to how rarely women face execution in the United States. Just 18 women have been put to death in the country since the 1970s, compared with 1,663 men, a disparity that experts say reflects both the nature of the crimes for which women are convicted and the severity of the punishment handed down when they are.
Pike's crime was the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer, a 19-year-old whom Pike met while she was 17 at a job training camp for troubled teens. Pike, then 18, and her boyfriend Tadryl Shipp, who was 17, beat, tortured and killed her. Slemmer was found with a pentagram — a symbol of Satanic ritual — carved into her chest, and the discovery triggered a media frenzy in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Pike had accused Slemmer of insulting her and of trying to take her boyfriend away from her. Two other residents at the camp later testified that Pike bragged about the killing both before and after it happened, and that she showed them a piece of the victim's skull.
Pike was sentenced to death a year later. Shipp, who was a child at the time of the offence, received life imprisonment with the possibility of parole — a disparity her lawyers have long argued is one of the gravest injustices in the case.
For the family of Colleen Slemmer, however, the prospect of an execution brings anything but comfort. Her mother has said she wants the sentence carried out so that her daughter can "finally can be resting". The competing griefs of the two families — one insisting the punishment is too severe, the other insisting justice demands it — frame a case that has divided opinion from the outset.
In the weeks before the scheduled execution, Pike has been reaching out to the small circle of people who support her. Ashlee Sellars, a friend, last heard from her earlier this week when Pike texted from her cell. Sellars says Pike has asked that none of her loved ones be present on Wednesday, so that they do not have to witness it.
Sellars struggles to reconcile the woman she knows with the crime committed three decades ago. What she describes is someone kind and protective of others — a person almost unrecognisable from the account of a brutal, ritualised killing involving a rival for a boyfriend's affection.
Her lawyers take a different route, arguing not that the crime was different but that the woman who committed it was. Pike has a documented history of childhood sexual abuse, abandonment and neglect, and her defence contend that had she been tried for the same offence today, as a teenager, she would not have received a death sentence.
Much of that history was known in 1995. Forensic psychologist Dr Diana McCoy was hired by Pike's trial defence and concluded that she had been severely neglected by both parents, physically and sexually abused by several of her mother's husbands and boyfriends, and raped repeatedly — including at the age of 11 and again at 17. It later emerged that she had also been repeatedly raped as a toddler by her grandmother's boyfriend. McCoy found that Pike's mother did not believe her allegations.
But Pike's trial lawyer never called McCoy to the stand, nor did she call many of the witnesses the psychologist recommended. Those details only surfaced more than a decade later, during a post-conviction hearing in which a new legal team argued that Pike had received ineffective assistance of counsel. The judge rejected that claim.
Sandra Babcock, an expert on gender and the death penalty at Cornell Law School who has worked on Pike's defence, says it is mind-boggling that the jury never heard about her client's abuse and rape, even though the defence team knew of it at the time. For Babcock, what makes the case stand out is not simply the scale of the sexual violence Pike suffered but its combination with her youth and her mental illness.
That mental illness has since been formally documented. In 2021, while in prison, Pike was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and has been receiving medication ever since. Dr Bethany Brand, another forensic psychologist who assessed her for the defence in 2023, said the case was extremely rare because she had been abused by so many people who ought to have protected her.
Brand describes a childhood replete with physical, sexual and emotional abuse, with Pike sexually violated by a number of men from before she was school age. She said Pike had suffered untreated manic episodes linked to bipolar disorder and untreated post-traumatic stress disorder, and that together those conditions shaped how threatened she felt by the girl she killed and her lack of emotional control at the time.
Babcock, who has spent decades studying how women are treated in capital cases, argues the case is a indictment of the system as a whole. In her view, executing a woman with Pike's history would suggest the death penalty "is not for the worst of the worst" but for those who receive the worst legal representation and who are the most damaged and vulnerable.
As Wednesday approaches, the questions Pike's case raises — about childhood trauma, competency, ineffective counsel and the gendered use of capital punishment — remain unresolved. Her lawyers are still pressing for a last-minute reprieve, and the clemency petition and the intervention by UN experts are the last avenues they have left.
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