Pike’s lawyers have filed a clemency petition with Tennessee’s governor, Bill Lee, that tells her story through an entirely different lens than presented in her trial. Photograph: Courtesy of Christa Pike View image in fullscreen Pike’s lawyers have filed a clemency petition with Tennessee’s governor, Bill Lee, that tells her story through an entirely different lens than presented in her trial. Photograph: Courtesy of Christa Pike Capital punishment Tennessee says child rapists deserve to die. Now it prepares to execute one of their victims At 18, Christa Pike was sentenced to death for murder. What if the jury knew she had suffered years of sexual abuse as a child?
The video is timestamped 30 March 1996. We see the back of a young woman’s head, her auburn hair cradled in a white scrunchie. She is crying quietly as the female judge reads out her sentence.
“It is ordered that you shall be put to death by execution as prescribed by law,” the judge says.
The woman’s shoulders start to quiver, and her weeping intensifies.
“Your body shall be subjected to shock by sufficient current of electricity that you shall die. May God have mercy upon you.”
The woman turns back towards the camera, urgently searching for her mother seated a few rows behind her. Her almost childlike face is peppered with acne.
“Can I please hug my mom before I go,” she wails. “Please, just let me have a hug. I love you.”
Those are her last words before she is taken away, without being allowed that hug, to death row. She would spend the next almost 30 years in solitary confinement.
Read more Christa Pike had just turned 20 in the video. She was 18 on the night of 12 January 1995 when she and her then boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, brutally beat and murdered an acquaintance, Colleen Slemmer, 19, on a University of Tennessee campus.
The state of Tennessee has deemed Pike, now 50, to be among the “worst of the worst”, a cold-blooded murderer whose crime was so heinous that even being locked up until she dies of natural causes would be too lenient. She is scheduled to be put to death by lethal injection at Riverbend maximum security institution in Nashville on 30 September.
View image in fullscreen Christa Gail Pike is escorted from Knox county criminal court on 30 March 1996 after being sentenced to death for the murder of Colleen Slemmer. Photograph: Joe Howell/Knoxville News-Sentinel There have only been three women executed by Tennessee since the state was founded in 1796, at least two of whom were enslaved people.
The most recent was more than 200 years ago, in 1819.
On Wednesday, Pike’s lawyers filed a 226-page clemency petition with Tennessee’s Republican governor, Bill Lee. The mercy plea presents Pike’s story through another lens, starting with her age at the time of the crime.
In the modern era of the US death penalty, Tennessee has never executed a person who was 18 at the time of their offence – the youngest was 23. Over the past 50 years, the state sent seven men who were 18 when they committed murder to death row, but in each case the sentence was vacated.
Shipp, Pike’s accomplice, held a fascination with satanic imagery. It was he who carved a pentagram in the victim’s chest, sending the local media into a frenzy. Yet because he was 17 at the time, he was barred from execution under Tennessee law; today he is serving a life sentence and had his first, unsuccessful, parole hearing in October 2025.
If they execute Christa Pike, it will confirm that the…