This undated photo released by the Tennessee Department of Correction shows Christa Pike. (Tennessee Department of Correction
(TNND) —As Tennessee prepares for a Sept. 30 execution, the Tennessee Supreme Court hasdenieddeath row inmate Christa Gail Pike’s request to stop it.
The court rejected Pike’s challenge to the state’s lethal-injection protocol, finding that her thrombocytosis diagnosis, a condition involving elevated blood platelets, did not show the execution would violate the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
WASHINGTON – JULY 01: Activists participate
WASHINGTON – JULY 01: Activists participate in a vigil against the death penalty in front of the U.S. Supreme Court July 1, 2008 in Washington, DC. The Abolitionist Action Committee and the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty held the vigil to abolish the death penalty to mark the 1972 and 1976 Supreme Court rulings suspending the death penalty and later allowing executions to resume. (Photo by Alex Wong/
Pike had also argued that being watched by male prison officials, restrained on a gurney, or having an IV placed near her chest or groin could cause psychological harm because of childhood sexual assaults and her diagnoses of PTSD and bipolar disorder.
The state has agreed to several accommodations, including having female correctional officers transport Pike to Riverbend Maximum Security Institution and trying to use only female staff to observe her. A privacy screen will be available while she showers or uses the restroom, and she will be allowed contact with a spiritual adviser in the 12 hours before the execution. The adviser may also be in the execution chamber.
Pike’s lawyers said they will seek relief
Pike’s lawyers said they will seek relief from the US Supreme Court while continuing to ask Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee to commute her sentence to life in prison without parole.
Pike, 50, is Tennessee’s only woman on death row. She was sentenced to death in 1996 for the 1995 killing of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a fellow student at the Knoxville Job Corps Center.
Prosecutors said Pike, then 18, and two other teens lured Slemmer to a secluded area and attacked her. Slemmer was beaten, stabbed, and killed.
Pike was the only defendant charged capitally
Pike was the only defendant charged capitally in the case. Her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, was 17 and received life in prison because he was ineligible for the death penalty. Shadolla Peterson, who was 18 at the time, testified against Pike and Shipp and received probation, according to Pike’s clemency petition.
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Pike’s attorneys say she experienced sexual abuse, rape, and neglect as a child and was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder and PTSD. The Tennessee attorney general’s office has said it does not dispute the core abuse claims, according to the petition.
Pike was also convicted of attempted first-degree murder for a 2001 attack on another inmate, according to the court report.
If the execution is carried out, it would
If the execution is carried out, it would be Tennessee’s first execution of a woman since 1819 and the first execution in the state’s modern death penalty era of someone who was 18 at the time of the crime.
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