Tennessee Is Set to Execute Christa Pike. Her Lawyers Say the Death Chamber Would Reenact Her Rapes.
As Tennessee prepares for its first execution of a woman in more than two centuries, the case against Christa Pike has come to frame a difficult legal question: Can a state execute a person whose life has been shaped by repeated sexual violence without violating the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment?
Pike, 50, is scheduled to die by lethal injection on Sept. 30 for the 1995 torture and murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, her romantic rival. Defense attorneys and prosecutors agree on at least one point: Pike’s childhood was extraordinarily traumatic.
According to court records obtained by USA TODAY, Pike was raped before she entered preschool. Her grandmother’s boyfriend sexually assaulted her for years, continuing until she was in kindergarten. At 11, a neighbor raped her in an attack that led to an infection; by 12, she had attempted suicide. At 17, court records say, a stranger attacked her while she was walking, forced her into the woods and raped her.
That history is at the center of an unusual legal push. Pike’s attorneys, joined by dozens of women’s advocacy organizations and sexual abuse experts, argue that death by lethal injection would force Pike to relive those assaults. As corrections officers restrain her head, arms and legs and a male doctor administers the lethal injection—possibly near her groin—Pike would experience the trauma of rape again, they say.
“She will relive the sounds, the smells, and the pain,” a dozen women’s advocacy organizations wrote in a friend-of-the-court brief filed Sept. 10 with the Tennessee Supreme Court. “She will feel it now as she did then. And it will be as horrific for her now as it was then. … We have very little doubt that Christa Pike will go to her death believing and feeling that she is being raped yet again.”
The brief reflects a growing legal effort to account for the lasting effects of trauma in capital cases, particularly for women, who make up a tiny fraction of death row inmates. Pike is the only woman on Tennessee’s death row and one of 45 women nationwide. Only 18 women have been executed in the United States in the past 50 years. Pike would be the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.
The Tennessee Attorney General’s Office does not dispute that Pike suffered sexual violence throughout her girlhood or that she has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder tied to long-term trauma. But the state argues that her death sentence is justice and that she must be held accountable for her crime.
“The standard is not a painless execution,” William Ayers, an attorney for the state, said at a recent hearing. “Psychological harm alone is not a violation.”
Prosecutors also point to the brutality of Slemmer’s murder. On Jan. 12, 1995, Pike, then 18, her boyfriend and another young woman lured Slemmer into a wooded area in Knoxville, according to court records. Pike and her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, then 17, tortured and murdered Slemmer in a crime that drew international headlines both for its cruelty and because of Pike’s youth and gender.
“Armed with a box cutter and meat cleaver, Pike and two accomplices lured Slemmer to an isolated area. There, Pike kneed Slemmer’s head, threw her to the ground, and repeatedly kicked her,” the Tennessee Attorney General’s Office wrote in court documents. “When Slemmer tried to flee, Pike sliced her stomach with the box cutter. … As Slemmer begged for her life, Pike repeatedly kicked her in the face. Pike then cut Slemmer’s throat as she begged for mercy.”
After Slemmer made a final attempt to escape, Pike smashed the back of her head with a rock, according to the state. Shipp carved a pentagram into Slemmer’s chest, and Pike later showed a piece of Slemmer’s skull to a friend.
Pike was sentenced to death. Shipp received a life sentence because he was 17 at the time of the murder and not eligible for the death penalty.
For Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, Pike’s execution more than 30 years later represents long-awaited justice.
“I just want Christa down so I can end it, relieve my daughter, so she finally can be resting,” Martinez told WBIR-TV in 2021. “There’s not a day goes by that I don’t think about Colleen or how she died and how rough it was.”
As Pike’s execution date approaches, her case raises issues that reach beyond one crime: how the justice system treats women who are both defendants and survivors, how courts assess psychological suffering in executions and whether a death sentence can be carried out in a way that does not replicate a person’s deepest trauma.
Life as a woman on America’s death row: ‘The worst of both worlds’
Death row inmates are not guaranteed a pain-free death. But the U.S. Constitution requires that executions be free of cruel and unusual punishment.
In their brief, the women’s advocacy organizations argue that Pike’s execution is certain to take her back to the multiple rapes she endured as a toddler, a child and a teenager. The experience, they contend, would be so visceral that it would cross the constitutional line.
“There is a substantial risk she will feel and believe that she is being raped to death,” wrote the groups, which include the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, Rights4Girls and the Survivors Justice Project.
Survivors of extreme and prolonged sexual assault often experience powerful flashbacks when triggered, the groups say. They note that Pike still struggles to brush her teeth because the action can cause her to relive the sexual assaults she suffered as a preschooler.
Relived trauma is not “all in their head,” the groups write, rejecting an old myth. Survivors and their allies have fought for more than a century to dispel that idea, which dates at least to the mid-19th century, when women who experienced flashbacks were diagnosed with “hysteria” and believed to be malingerers.
What survivors actually experience, the groups say, is more like “eruptions roiling a survivor’s entire body and mind while she is reliving the torture she endured at an earlier time.”
The organizations, joined by dozens more sexual assault experts and women’s advocates, also appealed directly to Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, urging him to commute Pike’s sentence to life in prison. A spokeswoman for Lee, Elizabeth Johnson, did not respond to multiple requests for comment from USA TODAY.
“It is not just that she was a toddler when she was sexually abused for the first time, or that she was raped by three more men before her 18th birthday,” they wrote in a Sept. 10 letter. “It is that Christa was forced to cope with her sexual abuse and rape virtually alone, without any of the victim support services that we know are so vital to recovery.”
The experts say the rapes and their aftermath do not excuse Pike’s crime, but they do provide “context for trying to understand what otherwise might seem incomprehensible.”
“No dispassionate observer could look at the circumstances of Christa’s life, including her age at the time of the crime and her mental illness, and believe that she is among the most depraved and irredeemable offenders for whom the death penalty is traditionally reserved,” they say. “Indeed, her execution would shock the sensibilities of most people who were familiar with the facts of her life.”
In a Sept. 22 filing, Pike’s attorneys told the Tennessee Supreme Court that executing her would be “a form of gender-based violence prohibited under international law.”
“Ms. Pike’s life should not be spared simply because she is a woman,” they wrote. “But Ms. Pike’s sexual abuse and the systems that failed her happened because she is.”
Attorneys sparred over Pike’s trauma and how it would affect her execution during a recent three-day hearing in a Knoxville courtroom.
Under questioning by the defense, a psychologist who assessed Pike said it would be extremely triggering for her to be strapped to the execution gurney by four guards. The two-week period known as death watch, during which guards closely monitor inmates largely to prevent suicide, also likely would trigger Pike’s past traumas, the psychologist said.
The state stopped short of guaranteeing that the four guards would be female, but prosecutors said they would try to keep men away from Pike.
David Wickenheiser, an assistant attorney general, quoted from the psychologist’s report during the hearing: “Christa has matured and learned to process her trauma and she is truly a different person than she was at the time of the murder,” wrote Bethany Brand, a Towson, Maryland-based clinical psychologist and trauma expert who personally assessed Pike.
Brand continued: “Christa will always carry that history of trauma with her, but she now has the tools and emotions to deal with life stressors.”
Senior Judge Mark Ward, the special master appointed by the Tennessee Supreme Court who presided over the hearing, concluded that Pike failed to show that her history of sexual assault and PTSD would make it likely that she would experience needless suffering. He also found that the Tennessee Department of Correction had “minimized the potential” for Pike to experience significant triggering.
He cited measures including arranging for female staff and a privacy screen for Pike to use while showering or using the restroom.
On Sept. 23, the Tennessee Supreme Court found that Pike was not entitled to a stay of execution because of the sexual abuse she experienced, leaving her and her attorneys to pin their hopes on Lee or the U.S. Supreme Court.
“We will press forward,” they said in a Sept. 24 statement, adding that they would seek relief in the Supreme Court while pressing Lee to commute her death sentence to life in prison without parole. “We remain hopeful that he will.”
Pike has expressed remorse for killing Slemmer.
“Think back to the worst mistake you made as a reckless teenager. Well, mine happened to be huge, unforgettable and ruined countless lives,” she recently wrote in a clemency petition. “I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid. … I took the life of someone’s child, sister, friend. It sickens me now to think I had the ability to commit such a crime.”
Pike said it took her years to realize the gravity of what she did and even longer to accept how many lives it affected. Today, she says, she is a completely different person.
Pike, 50, takes mood-stabilizing medications for bipolar disorder and PTSD, goes to therapy and has found an outlet in painting and in “helping new women to the prison,” her attorneys say in the clemency petition.
“After years of psychotherapy and medications to treat her mental illness, Christa is thoughtful, even-tempered, bright, funny, and hopeful,” they say. “She exhibits deep remorse for killing Colleen Slemmer and the impact of her actions on Colleen’s family and friends.”
Her attorneys also argue that an 18-year-old brain is “less mature, more impulsive and emotional, more susceptible to peer pressure, and less able to make rational decisions.” They point out that it is unusual for Tennessee to execute someone who was so young at the time of the murder.
Of more than 200 people sentenced to death in Tennessee in the past 50 years, they say, only seven others were 18 at the time of their crimes. All of those death sentences have since been vacated, according to the defense.
Slemmer’s mother recently told WBIR-TV that she plans to attend Pike’s execution next week. Had Slemmer lived, she would have turned 50 on Sept. 20.
“I’ll hold Colleen’s picture up to remind her of what she did,” Martinez told the station. “She never apologized—never even tried—or her family.”
She said she remembers her daughter as a playful and compassionate young woman who loved roller skating, computers and playing old games with her family. She laments that her daughter has been so overshadowed by Pike over the years.
“It’s never about the victims,” she said. “It’s like Colleen was never there.”
Contributing: Keith Sharon, Nashville Tennessean. Amanda Lee Myers is a senior crime and courts reporter who covers the death penalty, cold cases and breaking news for USA TODAY. Follow her on X at @amandaleeusat.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Too traumatized to die? Women rally to halt execution of rape survivor