Tennessee is preparing an all-female team to give a lethal injection to Christa Gail Pike on Wednesday, a request her lawyers made due to decades of sexual abuse and PTSD.
Pike, 50, is the only woman on the state’s death row.
The sentence is scheduled to be carried out at 10 a.m. at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, if it goes as planned, she will be the first woman Tennessee has executed in more than 200 years.
Pike’s attorneys asked that male guards stay out of the room when she is strapped down for pentobarbital.
They argued that being restrained by men would remind her of childhood rapes.
A clinical psychologist testified that the gurney, the straps, and a male presence would make her collapse into the assaults that began when she was a toddler.
A coalition of sexual-violence specialists told Gov. Bill Lee the process would make her “feel and believe that she is being raped to death.”
On September 2, Pike’s legal team filed a 226-page petition asking to commute the sentence to life without parole.
They say the jury never heard that Pike was raped as a small child, that a 37-year-old neighbor raped her at 11 and walked with a suspended sentence, and that a stranger raped her at 17.
After the verdict, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and PTSD.
“Christa was broken, not evil,” they wrote. They argued Lee can “protect a victim of child rape and correct the mistakes of the adults, institutions and systems that consistently failed Christa as a child.”
In January 1995, Pike, then 18, and two other Job Corps students lured 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer onto the University of Tennessee agriculture campus in Knoxville.
Slemmer was brutally beaten. They carved pentagrams and satanic symbols into her body and slit her throat.
Her head was so badly destroyed that Pike was able to keep a piece of her skull.
Tadaryl Shipp, her 17-year-old boyfriend, received life in prison because he was too young to be eligible for the death penalty in the state.
Shadolla Peterson, also 18, testified for the state and got probation.
May Martinez, Slemmer’s mother, is driving more than eight hours from Jacksonville to watch.
Martinez called Pike’s clemency bid “complete baloney.”
“I don’t think she should be allowed to have any special treatment,” she told the Daily Mail. “She didn’t consider how my daughter felt — she’s just playing the system … It’s all bullcrap.”
The Tennessee Supreme Court refused to halt the injection on September 23.
Pike’s legal team has said they will take it to the Supreme Court.
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