Supreme Court declines Christa Pike’s clemency appeal, with Tennessee set to execute first woman in 200 years

The Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to stop the execution of a Tennessee inmate who was convicted in the 1995 murder of a teenage classmate, clearing the way for the state’s first execution of a woman in 200 years.

Christa Pike, 50, is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection at 10 a.m. local time Wednesday at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. She is the lone woman on the state’s death row.

The high court’s denial came less than a day before that deadline with no explanation. Its intervention was Pike’s last hope, as Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee (R) announced earlier in the week that he would not grant clemency.

Pike was convicted of first-degree murder in 1996 for the brutal killing of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a fellow Jobs Corps Center worker from Knoxville, Tenn. Prosecutors said Slemmer was lured to an abandoned steam plant near the University of Tennessee agricultural campus, where she was beaten, tortured and ultimately killed by Pike and Pike’s then-boyfriend.

Court documents show that the pair had a strained relationship, with Pike claiming that Slemmer had been “trying to get [her] boyfriend.” Pike confessed to the murder, admitting that she had slashed Slemmer’s throat several times, threw asphalt at her head and kept a piece of her skull as a souvenir, among other admissions.

Authorities also found a pentagram carved into Slemmer’s chest, though Pike has denied doing that herself.

Pike was 19 years old when the crime occurred and became the youngest person incarcerated on Tennessee’s death row at the age of 21.

In bids to stop her execution, Pike’s federal public defenders noted that she was subjected to “extreme sexual abuse,” including rape, throughout her childhood. That mitigating history was not fully presented to the jury during the sentencing phase, they said.

She has since been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and bipolar disorder. Pike’s petition to the Supreme Court argued the state’s lethal injection protocol coupled with her medical conditions would cause her to suffer “extreme psychological torture when extracted from her cell and strapped to the execution gurney” in violation of her constitutional rights.

Pike described herself as a “mentally ill 18-year-old kid” in her state clemency petition, which argued that she had “changed significantly” while in prison.

“It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I’d done,” she wrote. “Even more to accept how many lives I affected. 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 was convicted of another count of first-degree murder in an assault on fellow inmate Patricia Jones in August 2001, according to the Tennessee Department of Correction.

Slemmer’s mother wanted the execution to go forward, telling local affiliate WKRN earlier this week that “maybe now finally we have the justice.”

“It may not bring my daughter back, but it might save another person from getting killed because she will do it again,” May Martinez said.