Governor Bill Lee Denies Clemency for Christa Pike, Refusing to Stop Tennessee’s First Execution of a Woman in More Than 200 Years

For updates on the botched execution attempt of Christa Pike on September 30, please see our full story here.

On September 28, 2026, Governor Bill Lee denied a clemency request from death-sentenced prisoner Christa Pike, who is scheduled to be executed on September 30. Gov. Lee announced, “[a]fter deliberate consideration of Christa Gail Pike’s request for clemency, and after a thorough review of the case,” he said he would uphold “the sentence of the State of Tennessee,” noting he did not plan to intervene. Ms. Pike’s attorneys, following Gov. Lee’s announcement, said that they “are deeply saddened and heartbroken” by the decision, and that Tennessee will now be “on singular footing: Christa will be the first person Tennessee executes in modern death penalty era who was a teenager at the time of the offense and the first woman executed by the state in more than 200 years.”

In 1995, at age 18, Ms. Pike and two other teens killed 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, whom they knew from Knoxville Job Corps. Ms. Pike was the only individual to be capitally charged. Her then-boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp, who was 17 years old, was ineligible for a death sentence and received a life sentence; he is now eligible for parole, while Shadolla Peterson, who was 18, testified against Ms. Pike and Mr. Shipp and received probation.

Counsel for Ms. Pike filed a lengthy clemency petition with Gov. Lee, asking him to commute her death sentence to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Her clemency petition outlined the case her team built over decades of appeals: how Ms. Pike’s actions cannot be separated from a childhood marked by repeated rape, sexual abuse, and neglect that went unaddressed by the adults and the state systems meant to protect her. Tennessee did not dispute the core factual claims underlying Ms. Pike’s petition, and during an August 13 hearing on her challenges to the state’s lethal injection protocol, the Tennessee Attorney General’s Office told the courts that the state does not contest the abuse Ms. Pike suffered, adding that everyone in the courtroom wished it had never happened “and that she was not on death row.”

Much of Ms. Pike’s clemency petition documented the childhood abuse she experienced, beginning with repeated sexual assault at the hands of her grandmother’s boyfriend between ages two and five. The petition notes that as a young child, Ms. Pike drew a graphic picture at school hinting at what was happening to her; her parents were called in, but as the petition notes, no one investigated any further. At age 11, she was raped by a neighbor; she told her mother about this assault but was not believed. The neighbor was later arrested and pleaded no contest to taking “immoral, improper, and indecent liberties” with a child, but was not given prison time and moved back into his home, just a minute down the block from Ms. Pike, who had to walk by his house to get to school. At age 17, almost exactly a year before the crime in question, Ms. Pike was again attacked, assaulted, and raped by a stranger. The man was never identified.

More than 100 organizations and experts dedicated to ending violence against women had called on Gov. Lee to commute Ms. Pike’s sentence to life in prison without parole. Their letter notes that, while her history of abuse and rape does not excuse her crime, it offers “an explanation for how she came to commit that crime, a context for trying to understand what otherwise might seem incomprehensible.”

Ms. Pike’s clemency petition also argues that her death sentence is an outlier by Tennessee’s own standards. Of the more than 200 people sentenced to death in the state’s modern era, only eight — including Ms. Pike — were 18 at the time of their offense. The death sentences of the other seven people in that group, all men, have since been vacated, leaving no other defendant 18 years old at the time of the crime on death row. No 18-year-old has been sentenced to death in Tennessee since Ms. Pike, thirty years ago. The average age at the time of the crime among the 17 people Tennessee has executed in the modern era of the death penalty is just under 29 years old, with the youngest having been 23.

As the Death Penalty Information Center (DPI) documented in Immature Minds in a “Maturing Society”: Roper v. Simmons at 20, new death sentences for individuals who committed an offense at age 18, 19, or 20 have become functionally nonexistent. Only five counties in the entire U.S. — one fifth of one percent — sentenced a person under age 21 at offense to death between 2020 and 2025. These sentences averaged out to just one per year, representing only 5% of all new death sentences on the same time period. Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Roper v. Simmons in 2005, just 58 death sentences have been imposed on individuals under the age of 21 at the time of the crime.

May Martinez, Colleen Slemmer’s mother, told the Nashville Banner that she plans on attending Ms. Pike’s execution, and will make the trip from Florida to Nashville. She has said she hopes the execution will bring her some peace so she can go on with her family, though she has also said she isn’t sure it will offer any closure. Ms. Martinez remembers Colleen as playful and compassionate, someone who loved roller skating, computers, and playing old games with her family, and says of news coverage, “[i]t’s like Colleen was never there.” She has said Ms. Pike has never apologized to her family, while Ms. Pike’s attorneys describe her as a thoughtful woman with deep remorse. As DPI’s resources on victims’ families explain, murder victims’ families hold a wide range of views about what justice means: for some, the death penalty holds the promise of closure, while for others it is a source of continued trauma and uncertainty.

Less than a week before her scheduled execution, the Tennessee Supreme Court denied Ms. Pike’s request for a stay of execution. The justices found “that Ms. Pike failed to demonstrate a likelihood of success on the merits of her claims,” denying her final state court appeal. Ms. Pike had argued the state’s lethal injection protocol, in concert with her medical conditions, would complicate the execution process and violate the Eighth Amendment. Her challenge also asserted that with her Post Traumatic Stress Disorder would make it “sure or very likely” that being observed and moved by male prison staff for two weeks would cause her “serious illness and needless suffering.” Ms. Pike also presented alternative methods of execution, which she argued would “significantly reduce a substantial risk of severe pain.”

In an amicus brief supporting Ms. Pike’s challenge, a group of sexual violence and trauma experts had urged the Tennessee Supreme Court to issue a certificate of commutation, explaining how the state’s execution protocol was likely to trigger severe, traumatic flashbacks for Ms. Pike. “Flashbacks are ‘powerful and uncontrollable re-enactments’ of past trauma,” the brief explains, and although a survivor is not physically experiencing a rape or torture during one, “[i]n all the ways that matter to their experience of the event, the trauma is real.”