What to know: Christa Pike is scheduled to be executed in Tennessee on September 30, 2026. Her lawyers have asked Gov. Bill Lee to commute her sentence to life
What to know: Christa Pike is scheduled to be executed in Tennessee on September 30, 2026. Her lawyers have asked Gov. Bill Lee to commute her sentence to life without parole. A special master found Pike had not met the legal standard in her lethal injection challenge, though related filings remain active.
Christa Pike faces execution by lethal injection on September 30. If carried out, she would be Tennessee’s first woman executed in more than 200 years.
Pike was convicted in 1996 of murdering her Job Corps classmate, Colleen Slemmer, and initially sentenced to death by electrocution. Over the years she has appealed the decision and fought for clemency granting her life in prison without parole.
“I’ve represented people in many horrific cases, many sensationalized cases. When this comes down to the clemency, Christa’s case is one of the strongest that I’ve ever seen over the last 33 years,” Stephen Ferrell, a member of Pike’s defense team says in a new documentary from Criminally Obsessed titled Dead Woman Walking: Pike Vs Tennessee.
The most recent appeal from her legal team argued that lethal injection, Tennessee’s primary method of execution, is a violation of her constitutional rights. Pike’s lawyers argued that her essential thrombocytosis—a blood disorder associated with clotting and bleeding risks—along with difficult-to-access veins, could create a heightened risk of complications during an IV procedure. Her attorneys also argued that Pike’s PTSD, which they say stems from childhood sexual abuse and other trauma, could make the execution process itself psychologically harmful.
“Every day, I’ve woken up and lived that thought, all day every day. Every waking moment,” Pike says of anticipating her execution for the past year in Dead Woman Walking: Pike Vs Tennessee.
On August 21, Special Master W. Mark Ward rejected those claims, finding that Pike had not met the legal burden to show Tennessee’s lethal injection protocol would create a substantial risk of severe pain or needless suffering.
Those concerns gained urgency after Tennessee’s failed May 21 attempt to execute death row inmate Tony Carruthers. Officials established a primary IV line but could not establish the required backup line, and an attempt to place a central line was unsuccessful. The execution was halted, and Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee later granted Carruthers a one-year reprieve.
Dr. Mark Walton Fowler, who served as the physician during Carruthers’ failed execution attempt, has said he will oversee Pike’s execution. Pike’s legal team argues that Fowler is not qualified to place a central line should one be needed during the lethal injection procedure.
On September 3, Pike’s legal team filed a clemency petition with Gov. Lee. If the governor chooses, he could commute Pike’s death sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole, as he has the sole constitutional authority to do so.
Pike’s case calls into question the ethical nature of the death penalty, as well as the impact of age, gender, trauma, and public opinion in the era of the "Satanic Panic."
Now 50, Pike has acknowledged her role in Slemmer’s death and was later convicted of attempted first-degree murder in connection with a 2001 attack on another inmate. But she also acknowledges a deeply troubled past, including multiple instances of sexual abuse as a child and abusive and neglectful parents, that altered the course of her life from an early age. There are also questions of the quality of representation Pike received in her murder trial.
“If someone would have stepped in at age five, when they found out I was being molested. If someone would have stepped in at age seven when my stepfather was being very abusive, if someone would have stepped in at age 11, when I was horribly violated by a man in my neighborhood. If anyone would have done anything to help me, to get me psychological help or anything, maybe something would have been different,” Pike said.
Pike's case is covered in depth in the Criminally Obsessed original documentary, Dead Woman Walking: Pike Vs. Tennessee. It contains a rare interview with Pike herself as well as interviews with her legal team, investigators, experts like Judge Rosemarie Aquilina (made famous by the Larry Nassar case), and Colleen Slemmer’s mother.
Dead Woman Walking: Pike Vs. Tennessee is available now on the Criminally Obsessed YouTube page.
