NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has denied a clemency request from death row inmate Christa Gail Pike, saying he will not intervene in her scheduled execution Wednesday, Sept. 30, at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.
Lee announced Monday that after reviewing the case, he would uphold Pike’s death sentence.
“After deliberate consideration of Christa Gail Pike’s request for clemency, and after a thorough review of the case, I am upholding the sentence of the State of Tennessee and do not plan to intervene,” Lee said.
Pike, now 50, was convicted for the January 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer, a 19-year-old fellow Job Corps student in Knoxville. Prosecutors said Pike, along with two accomplices, lured Slemmer to a secluded area on the University of Tennessee agricultural campus, where she was tortured and murdered. Evidence presented at trial showed Slemmer was beaten, slashed and killed in a particularly brutal attack that gained national attention.
A Knox County jury convicted Pike of first-degree murder, and she was sentenced to death in 1996 at age 18. Pike remains the only woman on Tennessee’s death row.
If carried out, Wednesday’s execution will make Pike the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years, with reports indicating no woman has been executed by the state since the early 1800s. She would also become the first woman executed during Tennessee’s modern death penalty era.
The Tennessee Supreme Court recently declined to halt the execution, and Pike’s attorneys have continued pursuing last-minute appeals after arguing she suffered severe childhood abuse, neglect, sexual assault, and untreated mental illness before the crime occurred.
Victim family members have waited more than three decades for the sentence to be carried out. Pike is scheduled to receive a lethal injection at 10 a.m. Wednesday unless a court grants a final stay.
Colleen Slemmer (WVLT)
