Christa Pike's lawyers have filed a clemency petition seeking to commute her sentence ahead of the 30 September execution date. Ashlee Sellars last heard from her friend Christa Pike earlier this week when Pike texted her from her cell on death row as she prepares to be executed by lethal injection by the US state of Tennessee. Pike told Sellars she does not want any of her loved ones to be present on Wednesday when she is executed.
“"She doesn't want us to experience that," Sellars says.
Sellars finds it hard to reconcile this woman, whom she has only known to be kind and protective, with the person who committed a heinous crime 31 years ago. Pike, now 50, was 18 when she and her boyfriend at the time, Tadaryl Shipp, beat, tortured, and murdered Colleen Slemmer, a 19-year-old they met at a job training camp for troubled teens. The murder created a media frenzy in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1995 when Colleen was found with a pentagram, a symbol of Satanic ritual, carved into her chest. Pike had accused Colleen of insulting her and trying to steal her boyfriend.
Two other residents at the camp later testified that Pike had bragged about the murder before and after, and showed them a piece of Colleen's skull. A year later, she was sentenced to death, while Shipp—who was 17 at the time—was given a life sentence with the possibility of parole. Now, after years of failed appeals, Pike's execution has been set for Wednesday. If it goes ahead, she will be the first woman put to death in Tennessee in more than 200 years. Only 18 women have been executed in the US since the 1970s, compared to 1,663 men. Colleen's mother has said she wants Pike's execution to happen so that her daughter "finally can be resting".
Legal Developments
Pike's lawyers, who filed a 226-page clemency petition, are still hoping for a last-minute reprieve, and UN human rights experts have also called for the execution to be stopped. Pike has a documented history of childhood sexual abuse, abandonment, and neglect. Her lawyers believe that if she was found guilty of the same crime today as a teenager, she would not receive a death sentence.
In the years since her sentencing, her defense team has uncovered details about her childhood that they say the jury never had the chance to consider.
“"It is mind-boggling that they did not present any of her history of abuse and rape, even though they knew about it," says Sandra Babcock, an expert in gender and the death penalty at Cornell Law School, who has worked on Pike's defense.
“"Her case is so uniquely compelling, not just because of her really incomprehensible history of sexual violence but the combination of that with her youth and her mental illness."
In 1995, forensic psychologist Dr. Diana McCoy was hired by Pike's defense team and found she was severely neglected by both of her parents. McCoy's report found Pike was physically and sexually abused by several of her mother's husbands and boyfriends, and raped several times, once when she was 11 and again aged 17. Later, it was discovered that she was repeatedly raped as a toddler by her grandmother's boyfriend. McCoy said Pike's mother didn't believe her that these rapes happened.
However, Pike's trial lawyer did not put McCoy on the stand or call many of the witnesses she recommended. These details emerged more than a decade later in a court hearing reviewing her case, when a new team of lawyers claimed ineffective assistance of counsel, a claim that was denied by the judge.
