If Christa Gail Pike’s execution proceeds as deliberate subsequent 12 months, she’s going to grow to be the primary girl put to loss of life in Tennessee for the reason that state started to formally doc capital punishment greater than a century in the past. After tried appeals by Pike’s attorneys repeatedly failed, the Tennessee Supreme Courtroom on Tuesday set a date for her to be executed.
The order granted a scheduling request from the state for the loss of life warrant to be carried out Sept. 30, 2026, on the Riverbend Most Safety Establishment in Nashville, which homes a majority of Tennessee’s loss of life row inmates. Underneath the phrases of this week’s state Supreme Courtroom order, the jail warden is obligated to inform Pike of the tactic that the Division of Correction will use to execute her by Aug. 28.
Condemned inmates in Tennessee normally die by deadly injection, the state’s default execution methodology. However electrocution, whereas outdated, is technically additionally approved instead that inmates can “select” so long as they dedicated a capital crime earlier than Jan. 1, 1999. As studies elevated of botched executions utilizing deadly medicine in Tennessee and elsewhere round the US, the Tennessee Correction Division stated 5 inmates between 2018 and 2019 chosen electrocution as their most well-liked execution methodology.
Pike’s loss of life sentence
Now 49, Pike was convicted within the horrific 1995 homicide of Colleen Slemmer. Each have been college students at a profession coaching program for troubled youngsters in Knoxville when Slemmer was tortured and brutally killed, in response to courtroom paperwork. Prosecutors argued of their case towards Pike, then 18, that she had believed Slemmer, then 19, had wished to steal Pike’s boyfriend.
The boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, and Pike’s good friend Shadolla Peterson helped her perform the homicide, in response to courtroom information, which say Pike lower Slemmer with a field cutter and carved a pentagram onto her chest over the course of half-hour or an hour, in a wooded a part of the College of Tennessee’s campus. The slain teenager’s physique was found by a groundskeeper who “testified that the physique was so badly overwhelmed that he had first mistaken it for the corpse of an animal,” the courtroom information say.
Shipp, who was 17 on the time of Slemmer’s homicide and never eligible for the loss of life penalty, acquired a lifetime jail sentence and might be up for parole in November. Peterson testified towards Pike through the trial and acquired probation.
Pike was the youngest individual on loss of life row when she acquired her sentence in 1996, at 20. She has additionally been the one girl on Tennessee’s loss of life row for many of her three a long time behind bars — circumstances that her attorneys likened to solitary confinement in a lawsuit that argued the punishment was unconstitutional. The swimsuit led to a settlement in September 2024 permitting Pike extra alternatives for social interplay.
Fewer than 50 girls on loss of life row
The U.S. has executed 18 girls for the reason that trendy utility of loss of life penalty started in 1976, with the newest being Amber McLaughlin’s deadly injection in Missouri in January 2023, in response to the Loss of life Penalty Data Heart, a nonprofit group that shares information on capital punishment however would not take a place on it.
Whereas the Tennessee Division of Correction says no definitive information exist of executions that happened within the state earlier than 1900, a group of broadly cited unbiased analysis on capital punishment in early America reveals that Tennessee hasn’t put a girl to loss of life since 1820.
Amongst roughly 2,100 inmates at present awaiting execution nationwide, simply 48 are girls, in response to the Loss of life Penalty Data Heart, which revealed the outcomes of a tutorial examine that discovered most of them skilled gender-based violence previous to their convictions and that gender bias impacted almost all of their circumstances. The group says public views seem to have modified in current a long time, as solely three girls have been sentenced to loss of life anyplace within the U.S. since 2020.
Appeals, clemency petition
In petitions in search of clemency or a commuted sentence, Pike’s attorneys have constantly pointed to the unlikelihood of her receiving a loss of life sentence for a similar crime had she dedicated it as a young person within the current day. Their filings cite her historical past of psychological sicknesses, together with PTSD and bipolar dysfunction, congenital mind injury, childhood sexual abuse, abandonment and neglect, noting that proof of these points wasn’t offered at Pike’s trial.
“Society’s view of who is really deserving of a loss of life sentence has modified within the years since Christa Pike was sentenced,” Robin Maher, the Loss of life Penalty Data Heart’s government director, informed CBS Information. “Her younger age, psychological sickness, and the bodily and psychological abuse she suffered on the time of her crime would seemingly persuade a jury immediately she just isn’t somebody who ought to obtain a loss of life sentence.”
Juries are at present sentencing fewer younger individuals to loss of life than they as soon as did, in response to the middle, which says solely three states that also observe the loss of life penalty have imposed new loss of life sentences on an individual between 18 and 20 within the final 5 years.
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