Up to date Sept. 24, 2026, 8:37 p.m. ET
Protection attorneys and prosecutors agree about one factor on the subject of demise row inmate Christa Pike: Her childhood was uniquely traumatic.
Earlier than she was even in preschool, Pike was a rape sufferer. Her grandmother’s boyfriend focused her for years, sexually assaulting the kid till she was in kindergarten, in response to courtroom paperwork obtained by USA TODAY.
On the age of 11, a neighbor raped Pike in an assault that triggered an an infection and preceded a suicide try on the age of 12. And at 17, a stranger attacked Pike whereas she was out strolling, compelled her into the woods, and raped her, courtroom data say.
Due to that trauma, Pike’s attorneys and dozens of ladies’s advocacy organizations and sexual abuse consultants are making a novel argument about why she needs to be spared from execution subsequent week in Tennessee: They are saying that Pike will relieve the trauma of her rapes when corrections officers strap down her head, arms, and legs, and a male physician offers her a deadly injection, presumably close to her groin.
“She is going to relive the sounds, the smells, and the ache,” wrote a dozen ladies’s advocacy organizations in what’s referred to as a friend-of-the courtroom transient filed within the Tennessee Supreme Court docket on Sept. 10. “She is going to really feel it now as she did then. And it is going to be as horrific for her now because it was then. … (We) have little or no doubt that Christa Pike will go to her demise believing and feeling that she is being raped but once more.”
Pike is about to be executed on Sept. 30 for the extended and brutal homicide of her romantic rival, 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer.
As the one lady on Tennessee’s demise row, and simply one in every of 45 nationwide, Pike is in an especially distinctive place. Solely 18 ladies have been executed within the U.S. within the final 50 years, and Pike can be the primary lady executed in Tennessee in additional than 200 years.
The Tennessee Legal professional Common’s Workplace doesn’t dispute any of the sexual violence Pike skilled all through her girlhood nor her prognosis of post-traumatic stress dysfunction from long-term trauma. The state maintains that her demise sentence represents justice and that Pike should be held to account for her crime.
“The usual is just not a painless execution,” lawyer for the state William Ayers stated at a latest listening to concerning the matter. “Psychological hurt alone is just not a violation.”
Additionally they level to the ruthlessness of Slemmer’s homicide.
On Jan. 12, 1995, 18-year-old Pike, her boyfriend, and one other younger lady lured Slemmer to the woods in Knoxville. Pike and her boyfriend, then-17-year-old Tadaryl Shipp, tortured and murdered Slemmer in a criminal offense that made worldwide headlines each for its brutality and due to Pike’s gender and youth.
“Armed with a field cutter and meat cleaver, Pike and two accomplices lured Slemmer to an remoted space. There, Pike kneed Slemmer’s head, threw her to the bottom, and repeatedly kicked her,” the Tennessee Legal professional Common’s Workplace wrote in courtroom paperwork. “When Slemmer tried to flee, Pike sliced her abdomen with the field cutter. … As Slemmer begged for her life, Pike repeatedly kicked her within the face. Pike then lower Slemmer’s throat as she begged for mercy.”
After Slemmer made one ultimate try to flee, Pike smashed the again of her head with a rock, they wrote. Shipp additionally carved a pentagram into Slemmer’s chest, and Pike later confirmed off a chunk of Slemmer’s cranium to a good friend.
Pike was sentenced to demise and Shipp acquired a life sentence as a result of at 17, he wasn’t eligible for the demise penalty.
For Slemmer’s mom, Might Martinez, Pike’s execution greater than 30 years after her daughter’s homicide represents long-awaited justice.
“I simply need Christa down so I can finish it, relieve my daughter, so she lastly will be resting,” Martinez advised WBIR-TV in 2021. “There’s not a day goes by that I do not take into consideration Colleen or how she died and the way tough it was.”
As Pike’s execution day nears, here is what the consultants say about her abusive previous, how prosecutors say the state will attempt to make the execution much less traumatic, and what Pike has to say about why she deserves mercy.
Specialists: Pike will relive rapes in execution chamber
Dying row inmates aren’t assured a pain-free demise, however the U.S. Structure requires that their executions be freed from “merciless and weird punishment.”
Pike’s execution is for certain to take her again to the a number of occasions that males raped her as a toddler, a baby and an adolescent, the ladies’s advocacy organizations wrote within the friend-of-the-court transient. The expertise is prone to be so visceral to Pike, that it is going to be unconstitutionally merciless, they argue.
“There’s a substantial threat she’s going to really feel and consider that she is being raped to demise,” argue the teams, which embrace the Coalition Towards Trafficking in Girls, Rights4Girls and Survivors Justice Mission.
Survivors of maximum and extended sexual assault like Pike usually expertise highly effective flashbacks when triggered, they argue. To this present day, they are saying, Pike nonetheless struggles to brush her enamel as a result of it may trigger her to relive the sexual assaults she endured as a pre-schooler.
Relived trauma for survivors of sexual assault is just not, opposite to an previous fable, “all of their head,” the teams write. “Survivors and their allies have struggled for greater than a century to dispel this fable, which dates at the least to the mid-Nineteenth century, when ladies who skilled flashbacks have been identified with ‘hysteria’ and believed to be malingerers.”
What they really expertise, the teams say, is extra like “eruptions roiling a survivor’s whole physique and thoughts whereas she is reliving the torture she endured at an earlier time.”
The teams, joined by dozens extra intercourse assault consultants and girls’s advocates, additionally appealed on to Tennessee Gov. Invoice Lee and urged him to commute Pike’s sentence to life in jail. Governor’s spokeswoman Elizabeth Johnson has not responded to a number of requests for remark from USA TODAY.
“It isn’t simply that she was a toddler when she was sexually abused for the primary time, or that she was raped by three extra males earlier than her 18th birthday,” they wrote in a letter on Sept. 10. “It’s that Christa was compelled to deal with her sexual abuse and rape nearly alone, with none of the sufferer assist providers that we all know are so important to restoration.”
The consultants say that the rapes and their aftermath don’t excuse Pike’s crime, however they do present “context for attempting to grasp what in any other case may appear incomprehensible.”
“No dispassionate observer might have a look at the circumstances of Christa’s life, together with her age on the time of the crime and her psychological sickness, and consider that she is among the many most wicked and irredeemable offenders for whom the demise penalty is historically reserved,” they are saying. “Certainly, her execution would shock the sensibilities of most individuals who have been acquainted with the information of her life.”
In a submitting on Sept. 22, Pike’s attorneys advised the Tennessee Supreme Court docket that executing her can be “a type of gender-based violence prohibited beneath worldwide regulation.”
“Ms. Pike’s life shouldn’t be spared just because she is a lady,” they wrote. “However Ms. Pike’s sexual abuse and the techniques that failed her occurred as a result of she is.”
Prosecutors push for execution, say ladies will probably be concerned
Attorneys sparred over Pike’s trauma and the way it will influence her execution throughout a latest three-day listening to in a Knoxville courtroom.
Beneath questioning by the protection, they psychologist who assessed Pike stated that it is going to be extraordinarily triggering for Pike to be strapped to the execution gurney by 4 guards and that the two-week interval referred to as demise watch additionally seemingly will set off Pike’s previous traumas. Throughout demise watch, guards intently monitor inmates, largely to stop them from dying by suicide.
The state fell in need of guaranteeing that the 4 guards can be feminine, however prosecutors stated they might attempt to maintain males away from Pike.
David Wickenheiser, an assistant lawyer basic, quoted from the psychologist’s personal report on the courtroom listening to: “Christa has matured and discovered to course of her trauma and he or she is actually a special particular person than she was on the time of the homicide,” wrote Bethany Model, a Towson, Maryland-based medical psychologist and trauma professional who personally assessed Pike.
She continued: “Christa will at all times carry that historical past of trauma along with her, however she now has the instruments and feelings to take care of life stressors.”
Senior Choose Mark Ward, the particular grasp appointed by the Tennessee Supreme Court docket who presided over the listening to, concluded that Pike failed to indicate that her historical past of sexual assault and PTSD would make it seemingly that she’s going to expertise unnecessary struggling. He additionally discovered that the Tennessee Division of Corrections has “minimized the potential” for Pike to expertise important triggering.
He cited measures together with arranging for feminine employees and a privateness display screen for Pike to make use of whereas she is having a shower or utilizing the restroom.
On Sept. 23, the Tennessee Supreme Court docket discovered that Pike is not entitled to a keep of execution due to the sexual abuse she skilled, leaving her and her attorneys to pin their hopes on Lee or the U.S. Supreme Court docket.
“We are going to press ahead,” they stated in an announcement on Sept. 24, saying that they’re going to search aid within the Supreme Court docket whereas urgent Lee to commute her demise sentence to life in jail with out parole. “We stay hopeful that he’ll.”
Christa Pike: Colleen Slemmer’s homicide ‘sickens me’
Christa Pike has expressed regret for killing Slemmer.
“Assume again to the worst mistake you made as a reckless teenager. Properly, mine occurred to be big, unforgettable and ruined numerous lives,” she lately wrote in a clemency petition. “I used to be a mentally in poor health 18-year-old child. … I took the life of somebody’s youngster, sister, good friend. It sickens me now to suppose I had the power to commit such a criminal offense.”
She stated that it took her years to appreciate the gravity of what she did and much more to simply accept the what number of lives it affected. At the moment, she stated she’s a totally totally different particular person.
Pike, 50, takes mood-stabilizing medicines for her bipolar and PTSD, goes to remedy, and has discovered an outlet each in portray and in “serving to new ladies to the jail,” her attorneys say within the clemency petition.
“After years of psychotherapy and medicines to deal with her psychological sickness, Christa is considerate, even-tempered, shiny, humorous, and hopeful,” they are saying. “She displays deep regret for killing Colleen Slemmer and the influence of her actions on Colleen’s household and mates.”
Additional, they argue {that a} mind at 18 years previous is “much less mature, extra impulsive and emotional, extra susceptibleto peer strain, and fewer in a position to make rational selections.” They level out that it is uncommon for Tennessee to execute anybody who was so younger once they dedicated homicide.
Of extra they 200 individuals sentenced to demise in Tennessee within the final 50 years, they are saying solely seven others have been 18 on the time of their crimes. All of their demise sentences have since been vacated, they are saying.
Slemmer’s mom lately advised WBIR-TV that she plans to attend Pike’s execution subsequent week. Had Slemmer lived, she would have turned 50 on Sept. 20.
“I am going to maintain Colleen’s image as much as remind her of what she did,” Martinez advised the station. “She by no means apologized − by no means even tried − or her household.”
She stated she remembers her daughter as a playful and compassionate younger lady who liked curler skating, computer systems, and enjoying previous video games along with her household. She laments that her daughter has been so overshadowed by Pike through the years.
“It is by no means concerning the victims,” she stated. “It is like Colleen was by no means there.”
Contributing: Keith Sharon, Nashville Tennessean
Amanda Lee Myers is a senior crime and courts reporter who covers the demise penalty, chilly instances and breaking information for USA TODAY. Comply with her on X at @amandaleeusat.
