The case of Christa Pike, the first woman due to be executed in Tennessee in over 200 years

The state of Tennessee is preparing to execute a woman who was sentenced to death for the murder of another student when she was 18. If carried out as planned on Wednesday, Christa Pike, now 50, would be the first woman put to death in the mid-southeastern state in more than two centuries.The Tennessee Supreme Court last week denied Pike’s request to stay the execution. Tennessee’s governor, Republican Bill Lee, made the same decision on a petition for clemency on Monday. Pike’s lawyers then asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stay the execution, but the request was also denied.Pike was convicted in 1995 of murdering 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a fellow student at a vocational training center for young people in Knoxville, eastern Tennessee. According to the case record, Pike and two other youths, including her then-boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp, led Slemmer to a secluded spot, tortured and killed her. The boyfriend, who was 17 at the time, was sentenced to life in prison. The other person testified against both and received parole.According to the Tennessee Supreme Court ruling, Pike told police she believed Slemmer was trying to take her boyfriend away from her and initially only wanted to fight with her, but ended up killing her instead.The ruling says Pike had told a classmate the day before that she was going to kill Slemmer and admitted to police that she struck, kicked and cut the young woman’s throat. Slemmer tried several times to escape the attack, which lasted more than half an hour. Pike said she had hit Slemmer several times in the head with pieces of asphalt. Slemmer died from the head injuries, court documents say.Pike’s lawyers have asked that her death sentence be replaced with life without parole, arguing she suffered sexual abuse and mental health problems during childhood and adolescence. The defense says the attorneys who represented Pike at trial failed to present evidence of the abuse she endured to the jury.They also note that seven people, all men, who were sentenced to death in Tennessee for crimes committed at age 18 have had their sentences commuted. No one else that age has been sentenced to death in the state since Pike, 30 years ago.The abuse history cited by the defenseAccording to the clemency petition, Pike was the victim of sexual violence in childhood and suffered assaults between the ages of two and five by her grandmother’s boyfriend.At 11, a neighbor raped her, and Pike reportedly told her mother, who did not believe her, according to a summary of the petition prepared by the Death Penalty Information Center (DPI). The neighbor was arrested on charges of indecent acts with a minor but was not jailed. At 17, she was raped again by a stranger, the petition says. Pike was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.In the clemency petition, Pike’s lawyers said her mental health problems prevented her from ‘stopping herself.’ ‘I was an 18-year-old with a mental illness. It took me many years to even understand the gravity of what I had done. And even longer to accept how many people I affected. I took the life of someone’s daughter, sister, friend. I am now horrified to think I was capable of such a crime,’ Pike said in the petition, according to the AP.According to the DPI, new death sentences for crimes committed by people aged 18 to 20 are rare in the U.S. justice system. In 2005, in Roper v. Simmons, the U.S. Supreme Court prohibited the death penalty for crimes committed by people under 18. Since then, only 58 death sentences have been imposed for crimes committed before age 21. Between 2020 and 2025 those sentences represented 5% of new death sentences.Colleen ‘is not with me every day, every hour, every minute’Slemmer’s mother, May Martínez, has opposed halting the execution and said she will travel from Jacksonville, Florida, where she lives, to witness it. She described her daughter as a happy young woman who liked skating and family games.‘[Colleen] is not with me. She is not with me every day, every hour, every minute,’ the mother said in an interview this month with a local station, lamenting that attention on the case has focused on Pike and sidelined her daughter. ‘It’s as if Colleen never existed,’ she said, adding that she hoped the execution would bring some peace to the family.Pike’s execution, scheduled for September 30 at Riverbend maximum-security prison in Nashville, would be the 30th carried out in the country so far this year following the execution on Tuesday in Florida of Curtis Beasley for a 1995 murder.Florida has carried out 15 executions this year, including two on the same day for the first time since 1964. Last year Florida executed 19 people, nearly half of the 47 executions nationwide. In August, three states carried out executions, including Tennessee — something that had not happened since 2010.Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition