Tennessee governor denies clemency to woman facing execution

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has denied clemency to Christa Pike, leaving a Supreme Court appeal as her remaining chance to stop her scheduled execution Wednesday. If it proceeds, Pike would be the first woman executed in Tennessee since 1820.

Pike, 50, was sentenced to death for the 1995 killing of Colleen Slemmer, 19, a classmate in a Knoxville Job Corps program. Pike does not dispute her role in the killing. Her lawyers argue that the jury did not hear crucial evidence about the abuse and mental illness she experienced before the crime, when she was 18.

“Whether my clemency is granted or not, I am at peace,” Pike wrote in a letter to NBC News shared by her spiritual adviser before Lee announced his decision Monday. “I am not afraid to die. I’m only nervous about the process.”

Prosecutors said Pike believed Slemmer was a romantic rival and lured her to a secluded area, where she and her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, tortured and killed her. Investigators said Pike cut Slemmer with a box cutter and beat her with a piece of asphalt. The killing drew widespread attention after a pentagram was carved into Slemmer’s body. Shipp later testified that he carved it, NBC News reported.

Shipp, who was 17 at the time, received a life sentence with the possibility of parole because he was a juvenile. The Guardian reported that he was denied parole last year. A third participant, Shadolla Peterson, received probation after cooperating with authorities.

Pike’s attorneys say she endured sexual abuse from early childhood, was raped as a teenager and suffered from untreated mental illness. They argue that her trial lawyers failed to present the jury with critical evidence about her past or make the case that her age should weigh against a death sentence. She was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.

“It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I’d done,” Pike said in a statement included in her clemency petition. “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.”

In their Supreme Court request, Pike’s lawyers say being restrained on a gurney for lethal injection is likely to cause her “severe mental suffering and superadded psychological terror” because of her trauma. Tennessee has not denied that Pike suffered abuse. In a response filed Monday, the attorney general’s office said a judge had found it “speculative whether Pike would suffer” greater mental harm under the state’s execution protocol.

Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, wants the execution to go forward. She told The Guardian that her daughter loved roller skating, volunteered with the Special Olympics and hoped to work with computers. “She trusted everybody, and that was her downfall,” Martinez said.

Martinez told NBC News she plans to watch the execution while holding her daughter’s photograph. “I will sit there with her picture in my hand,” she said.

Tennessee officials told NBC News they would try to accommodate Pike’s request for female guards during her transfer to the execution site. An all-female execution team may also be assigned.