Tennessee Prepares to Execute Christa Pike, the First Woman in More Than 200 Years

Tennessee is preparing to execute Christa Gail Pike on Wednesday, September 30, in a case that would make her the first woman put to death by the state in more than 200 years.

Pike, now 50, is scheduled to receive a lethal injection at 10 a.m. Central time at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. Her execution date was set by the Tennessee Supreme Court in September 2025, and the court denied a request for a stay on September 23, 2026.

Gov. Bill Lee also declined to commute Pike’s sentence. In a statement reported Tuesday, Lee said that after reviewing her clemency request, he would uphold the state’s sentence and would not intervene.

The execution is not yet beyond the reach of the courts. Pike’s attorneys have asked the U.S. Supreme Court for emergency relief, arguing that Tennessee’s execution procedures violate her constitutional rights. Unless a court issues a stay, the execution is scheduled to proceed Wednesday.

Pike was 18 when she was convicted of killing 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a fellow student at a Knoxville-area Job Corps program, in 1995. Prosecutors said Pike and co-defendant Tadaryl Shipp attacked Slemmer during a dispute involving Pike’s boyfriend. Shipp, who was 17 at the time, received a life sentence with the possibility of parole.

Pike’s lawyers do not dispute that she was responsible for Slemmer’s death. Their clemency petition instead focuses on punishment and mitigation. They argue that Pike’s childhood sexual abuse, neglect, mental-health problems and age at the time of the crime should weigh against execution. The petition asks that her sentence be changed to life without parole.

That argument reflects a broader shift in how courts and lawmakers treat crimes committed by teenagers. The Supreme Court has prohibited the death penalty for crimes committed by people younger than 18, but Pike’s case falls just outside that constitutional line. If executed, she would be the first person put to death in Tennessee’s modern death-penalty era for a crime committed at age 18, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

The case also exposes the unusual history behind the “200 years” description. Tennessee’s official execution records show that capital punishment has existed intermittently since the state was founded, but the state’s last recorded execution of a woman occurred in 1820. Tennessee then went nearly four decades without carrying out any execution before resuming executions in 2000.

Pike has spent approximately three decades under a death sentence. That long interval is central to the debate over what the punishment now represents. For the state and Slemmer’s family, the execution would enforce a judgment for a brutal killing and bring a final act of accountability. For Pike’s attorneys and death-penalty opponents, it would impose the ultimate punishment on a person whose crime occurred during late adolescence and whose life since then has been shaped by prolonged confinement.

The scheduled execution therefore carries two meanings at once. Historically, it would end a centuries-long absence of executions of women in Tennessee. Legally and politically, it would test whether age, trauma and decades of incarceration can still persuade courts or the governor to halt a death sentence once the final date has arrived.

For now, the state’s machinery remains in motion. Pike remains under an active death sentence, and Tennessee has selected official witnesses and prepared for the execution. The final decision may come not from the governor’s office, but from a last-minute ruling by the federal courts.