By The Epoch Times | Created at 2026-09-30 03:21:54 | Updated at 2026-09-30 04:13:14
1 hour ago
The U.S. Supreme Court on Sept. 29 denied a stay of execution for Christa Gail Pike, clearing the way for Tennessee’s first execution of a woman in more than 200 years.
Unless there is some other extraordinary legal filing, the state is expected to execute Pike, 50, by lethal injection at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville at 10 a.m. Central Daylight Time on Sept. 30. She is the only female inmate on Tennessee’s death row.
A Knox County jury convicted her in 1996 of first-degree murder and conspiracy and sentenced her to death in the killing of Colleen Slemmer, 19, her classmate at Knoxville Job Corps, a residential job training program for disadvantaged teenagers and young adults.
In 2004, she received a separate concurrent 25-year sentence for the attempted murder of another inmate in 2001.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, refused a clemency request on Sept. 28. Before that, the Tennessee Supreme Court denied a stay of execution on Sept. 23.
The U.S. Supreme Court denied the reprieve on Sept. 29 in an unsigned order. No justices dissented. At the same time, the court also denied Pike’s petition seeking a formal review of the case. The justices did not provide reasons for their decisions.
Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti recounted the details of Pike’s crime in a Sept. 28 brief in opposition.
Pike, then 18, “beat, tortured, and killed Colleen Slemmer” because, in her own words, she “just felt mean” on Jan. 12, 1995, the date of the murder, Skrmetti said.
Prosecutors said Pike believed Slemmer was trying to take her boyfriend, a claim Slemmer’s friends denied.
Pike slashed Slemmer’s throat six times, stabbed her in the back with a meat cleaver, and crushed her skull with a block of asphalt, Skrmetti said.
Pike also carved a pentagram into the victim’s chest and forehead, and retained a piece of her skull as a souvenir.
In her stay application to the justices, Pike said the lethal injection protocol amounted to a kind of torture in her specific case.
Evidence provided by clinical psychologist Bethany Brand, who evaluated Pike, was quoted in the application.
Brand, a Towson University professor, said the procedures involved in the lethal injection process would be “highly triggering” for Pike, and would approximate her experience of “being pinned and trapped and raped. She won’t be able to escape like she couldn’t escape back then.”
The experience would likely “precipitate her having a flashback where she will lose all sense of current reality, and … be transported in her mind back to times when she was being raped, feeling the full emotional and physical force and sensations of that time,” Brand said.
Pike’s lawyers say she was sexually abused from preschool age through age 17. In the stay litigation, the state did not dispute that she suffered “terrible things,” including rape.
The Tennessee Supreme Court treated Brand’s evidence as legally irrelevant, accepting a special master’s finding that her potential “mental suffering” during the protocol was not evidence of cruel and unusual punishment under the U.S. Constitution’s Eighth Amendment.
Pike’s attorneys also said in earlier litigation that lethal injection would violate her beliefs as a Buddhist. She asked to be hanged, but that method of execution is not available in Tennessee. She could have chosen electrocution, but did not opt for that method.
