Christa Pike, poised to be the first woman Tennessee executes by lethal injection, is pleading with the Tennessee Supreme Court to spare her.
Her attorneys’ arguments lean on Pike’s childhood sexual abuse, her medical conditions including small veins and the state’s failed attempt to execute Tony Carruthers in May, according to a news release sent on behalf of her attorneys.
“[D]espite their protestations and bald assertions, the Respondents do not know how to carry out an execution that comports with either the United States Constitution or the Tennessee Constitution; they do not have the qualified and trained medical personnel to ensure that prisoners do not experience superadded pain, terror, disgrace, or lingering death; and they refuse to admit it,” the legal filing reads.
Her attorneys are asking the court to appoint a special master to investigate her claims challenging the lethal injection protocol in light of her “unique medical conditions,” the news release states.
Luke Ihnen and Stephen Ferrell, attorneys from the Federal Defender Services of Eastern Tennessee, filed the motion to appoint a special master with the state’s highest court June 12.
Pike, 50, is scheduled to be executed Sept. 30 for the 1995 killing of Colleen Slemmer in Knoxville. Pike and Slemmer were both students at a high school program for troubled adolescents when Pike tortured and beat Slemmer to death.
Pike kept a piece of Slemmer’s skull afterward.
Pike has made numerous challenges to her sentence on death row. She most recently argued that choosing her method of execution — lethal injection or electric chair— violates her Buddhist belief against “participating in any process leading to her own death.”
Pike lived in near-total isolation for more than a dozen years as the only woman on death row. In 2024, her lawyers reached a settlement with the state allowing her some social interactions.
Beginning when she was a toddler and through her childhood, Pike was repeatedly raped, lawyers say. The Tennessee Department of Correction diagnosed Pike with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress, which her attorneys attribute to the abuse.
Before execution, Pike will be isolated. Then, her attorneys note, guards, mostly likely men, will forcibly remove her, strap her to a gurney and hold her down to execute her. Pike’s lawyers argue this will cause her to relive the rapes she suffered.
Her lawyers say Pike has two medical conditions complicating lethal injection: small veins and thrombocytosis, a blood condition that would create a “bloody froth” in her lungs during execution.
Required by law to propose an alternative method of her death, Pike suggested a few things: Either the state use a small butterfly needle or central line to kill her by lethal injection, or she be hanged. The last woman executed in Tennessee, the enslaved Black woman Molly Holcomb, was hanged in 1807.
Two others participated in Slemmer’s killing. Shadolla Peterson, who testified for prosecutors at trial, received probation. Tadaryl Shipp, 17 at the time of the murder, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison because minors cannot be sentenced to death.
Slemmer’s mother has called for Pike’s death.