The video is timestamped 30 March 1996. We see the back of a young woman’s head, her auburn hair cradled in a white scrunchie. She is crying quietly as the female judge reads out her sentence.“It is ordered that you shall be put to death by execution as prescribed by law,” the judge says.The woman’s shoulders start to quiver, and her weeping intensifies.“Your body shall be subjected to shock by sufficient current of electricity that you shall die. May God have mercy upon you.”The woman turns back towards the camera, urgently searching for her mother seated a few rows behind her. Her almost childlike face is peppered with acne.“Can I please hug my mom before I go,” she wails. “Please, just let me have a hug. I love you.”Those are her last words before she is taken away, without being allowed that hug, to death row. She would spend the next almost 30 years in solitary confinement.Christa Pike had just turned 20 in the video. She was 18 on the night of 12 January 1995 when she and her then boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, brutally beat and murdered an acquaintance, Colleen Slemmer, 19, on a University of Tennessee campus.The state of Tennessee has deemed Pike, now 50, to be among the “worst of the worst”, a cold-blooded murderer whose crime was so heinous that even being locked up until she dies of natural causes would be too lenient. She is scheduled to be put to death by lethal injection at Riverbend maximum security institution in Nashville on 30 September.Christa Gail Pike is escorted from Knox county criminal court on 30 March 1996 after being sentenced to death for the murder of Colleen Slemmer. Photograph: Joe Howell/Knoxville News-SentinelThere have only been three women executed by Tennessee since the state was founded in 1796, at least two of whom were enslaved people.The most recent was more than 200 years ago, in 1819.On Wednesday, Pike’s lawyers filed a 226-page clemency petition with Tennessee’s Republican governor, Bill Lee. The mercy plea presents Pike’s story through another lens, starting with her age at the time of the crime.In the modern era of the US death penalty, Tennessee has never executed a person who was 18 at the time of their offence – the youngest was 23. Over the past 50 years, the state sent seven men who were 18 when they committed murder to death row, but in each case the sentence was vacated.Shipp, Pike’s accomplice, held a fascination with satanic imagery. It was he who carved a pentagram in the victim’s chest, sending the local media into a frenzy. Yet because he was 17 at the time, he was barred from execution under Tennessee law; today he is serving a life sentence and had his first, unsuccessful, parole hearing in October 2025.Had Pike been 10 months younger, she too would have been legally protected from the execution chamber. As time has passed, experts in children’s brains development have come to recognize that 18 is but an arbitrary line in the sand; adolescents – whatever their specific age – are susceptible to impulsive behavior.And then there’s gender. Some argue that the gender of the 45 women who are now held on death rows across the US is irrelevant to their eligibility for the ultimate punishment. But in Pike’s case, it seems all too pertinent, given the agonising litany of sexual and physical abuse she endured throughout her childhood.She was subjected to a bewildering array of abuse, including multiple rapes by three separate men and beatings by numerous relatives and their appendages.Age.
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Gender. Abuse. The ingredients are all there, Pike’s legal team argues in the clemency petition for her crime, terrible though it was, to be recast in a different light.Sandra Babcock, faculty director of the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide who has been involved in Pike’s legal representation since 2019, has studied the cases of 48 women on death rows across the states. She has read all their trial transcripts, pored over all the evidence.Her conclusion is that of all 48 women, Pike stands alone. The repetitive nature and severity of the sexual violence she endured, combined with the proximity of that violence to the crime she committed when she was barely an adult, makes her unique.Babcock told the Guardian: “If they execute Christa Pike, it will confirm that the death penalty is reserved not for the worst of the worst, but for the most damaged and vulnerable among us.”There is a second image of Pike that commands attention. It is a photo of her from when she was about two years old dressed in a red sweater.She has that infant’s expression – part excitement, part apprehension, as though she doesn’t know what to expect from life.The photo was taken around the time that Pike was first sexually abused. The details are contained in a forensic evaluation of the prisoner carried out in 2023 by Bethany Brand, a professor of psychology at Towson University.Brand spent 13 hours in clinical interviews with Pike inside the Debra Johnson rehabilitation center in Nashville that houses the female death row (Pike is its only resident). At one point the prisoner grew distressed, crying as she described to the psychologist what had happened to her in the period “before I could walk and talk until kindergarten”.Or to express that in years: between two and five.Pike as a child. Photograph: Courtesy of Christa PikeThe perpetrator, Ernest Johnson, was Pike’s paternal grandmother’s boyfriend. He was an alcoholic and drank all day, sending the grandmother out of the house to buy him liquor.That’s when he would abuse the child. “Ernest orally raped her when she was in preschool,” Brand noted in her report. “Christa showed utter disgust on her face as she spoke of the smell of this man’s genitals, she was extremely revolted by him, despite more than 30 years having passed.”Ernest forced her into silence about the abuse by threatening to hurt her pets, her grandmother and Pike herself. “Ernest locked Christa in a dark chicken coop where spiders crawled on her,” Brand wrote.The abuse did eventually surface at Pike’s elementary school. In what now seems like a cry for help, she sketched a large penis and demon face in a drawing class.If it had been a cry for help, it didn’t work. The teacher yanked her from her desk and marched her to the principal’s office where her parents were called, though no investigation was ever conducted.At age 11, Pike was raped outside her house by a 37-year-old neighbor named Claude Davis who lived in a trailer up the street and who was well known locally as a pedophile.Pike told her mother about the attack, but was disbelieved. Child protective services only became involved after Pike developed an infection from the violation.Davis was arrested and pleaded guilty to taking “immoral, improper and indecent liberties” with a child. He was given a suspended sentence and allowed back to his trailer, a few minutes’ walk from Pike’s home.Pike in an undated photograph. Photograph: Courtesy of Christa PikeIn January 1994, almost
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