Over the course of three days in August, Christa Pike watched as lawyers and expert witnesses in a Knoxville courtroom meticulously analyzed the abuse she suffered as a child and the different methods the state could use to kill her. Attending by way of a video call from the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center in Nashville, the only woman on Tennessee’s death row hovered over the proceedings on a projector screen as testimony moved from the rapes that began before she was in kindergarten to the question of whether she would suffer more during a hanging or a lethal injection.
At one point, after a day of testimony, Pike was so overwhelmed that she had to be carried out of the room where she’d been sitting, according to multiple people who were at the hearing.
Now 50, she is set to be executed on Sept. 30 for her part in the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer at an East Tennessee job training program when they were both still teenagers. She and her then-boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp, along with another teen girl, Shadolla Peterson, lured Slemmer to a wooded area where they tortured and killed her. Shipp, who was still 17 at the time, was sentenced to life in prison but could still be released on parole. Peterson agreed to testify for the state and avoided prison time altogether. But Pike, who was 18 at the time of the murder, was sentenced to death. Absent intervention from a court or Gov. Bill Lee, she will be the first woman executed in the state in more than 200 years.
Last month’s hearing came after the Tennessee Supreme Court appointed a Special Master to hear arguments over whether Pike’s medical and psychological conditions make her uniquely susceptible to a torturous death. Her attorneys have said small veins and a history of difficult blood draws portend complications during a lethal injection similar to the failed IV placement that caused the attempted execution of Tony Carruthers to be aborted in May. A clinical psychologist testified at the hearing that the lethal injection process — including being strapped down to a gurney, possibly by male guards — will result in Pike not merely remembering her sexual traumas, but “fully reliving them.” More recently, a coalition of experts and organizations focused on sexual violence urged the governor to call off Pike’s execution, which they said will cause her to “feel and believe that she is being raped to death.”
The court-appointed Special Master, Judge Mark Ward, announced on Aug. 21 that he would not block the execution after deciding that Pike’s attorneys had not proven it would violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. But the question at the heart of the August court hearing and the clemency petition Pike’s attorneys submitted to the governor earlier this month is something beyond the matters of law.