The US Supreme Court declined to stop Christa Pike's execution in Tennessee on the eve of her scheduled lethal injection in the Colleen Slemmer case. Pike, 50, is due to be executed at 11:00 EDT on Wednesday at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.
Christa Pike and Colleen Slemmer
Pike has been awaiting execution since she was convicted and sentenced to death in 1996 for the murder of Colleen Slemmer, a 19-year-old teenage classmate. Pike was 18 when she and her then-boyfriend beat, tortured and murdered Slemmer after meeting her at a job training camp for troubled teens.
Slemmer's murder created a media frenzy in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1995. Pike has denied carving the pentagram into Slemmer's chest herself, and she accused Slemmer of insulting her and trying to steal her boyfriend.
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee denied a request for clemency from Pike on Monday and said he would not intervene in her planned execution. Ahead of Wednesday morning, Pike's attorneys filed a petition with the US Supreme Court to stop the execution, arguing that an 18-year-old brain is not an adult brain and that Pike was too young at the time of the murder to be sentenced to death for it.
Two other residents at the camp later testified that Pike had bragged about the murder before and after, and that she showed them a piece of Slemmer's skull.
Riverbend Maximum Security Institution
If the execution proceeds, Pike would be the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years. Only 18 women have been executed in the US since the 1970s, compared with 1,663 men. The Tennessee Department of Corrections said Pike was the youngest person on death row at the time of her incarceration, and her scheduled execution now leaves her at the center of that narrow group of female death-row cases.
