FINAL HOURS Gov. Lee DENIES CLEMENCY — Christa Pike’s Execution WILL PROCEED AS PLANNED 

FINAL HOURS Gov. Lee DENIES CLEMENCY — Christa Pike’s Execution WILL PROCEED AS PLANNED 

It is therefore ordered that you shall be put to death. Today, the only woman on death row in Tennessee is set to be executed. What can stop this execution now? Pretty much just the governor of the state of Tennessee. The clock is running out. Just 24 hours remain before Christa Pike’s scheduled execution on September 30.

 Tennessee’s governor says he will not intervene. Pike’s supporters are still fighting. And the mother of the woman Pike murdered is preparing to bring one photograph to the execution. Can anything still stop what is scheduled for tomorrow morning? And why is Colleen Smer’s mother determined to show Pike her daughter’s face? Tennessee is preparing to execute a woman for the first time in more than two centuries.

Pike is the only woman on the state’s death row. The date is set. The witnesses have been selected. Governor Bill Lee has indicated that the execution will proceed as scheduled yet. The pressure on his office has not stopped. On Wednesday, September 23, advocates for young people gathered at a Nashville news conference and urged him to commute Pike’s death sentence.

 They were not disputing her conviction. They were asking whether life without parole could punish the murder while also recognizing the lasting damage of severe childhood abuse. At almost the same time, reports about a very different request were spreading. Pike reportedly wanted an all female team to carry out her execution.

 A governor signaling no change. A condemned prisoner making a final request. Advocates demanding mercy. Those were the headlines. Then came a quieter announcement from Florida. May Martinez, Colleen’s mother, plans to attend tomorrow, September 30, with a photograph of the 19year-old daughter she lost in 1995. Why a photograph? Because May says that after all these years, she has never received an apology from Pike.

 And because a soldout center court, while the country debates how Pike should die, May wants the person at the center of the original crime to be seen again. Look at what Tennessee has already put in motion. The state supreme court scheduled the execution for Wednesday, September 30 at 10:00 a.m. Central time at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution on Cochril Ben Boulevard in Nashville.

 On August 31, the Department of Corrections sent notice to media organizations. Witness applications were due by 9:00 a.m. On September 8th, one application per organization, no exceptions. On September 9th, a drawing selected seven journalists and two alternates. Their task was to enter, witness what happened, and report it afterward.

 Seven seats for journalists, two alternations. Every detail was accounted for, right down to who would be permitted inside. Yet, there was no equivalent schedule that could settle what Colleen’s mother had been waiting for since 1995. The administrative machinery is now moving tomorrow morning. But while Tennessee has been deciding who will watch, Pike’s lawyers have been trying to change what those witnesses might see.

 What exactly? Had they found a challenge. In July, the defense attacked the state’s lethal injection procedure, not the murder conviction, not the jury’s verdict. The dispute concerned Pike’s physical condition and the execution process itself. Her lawyers told the court she had thrombocytosis, a disorder involving an excess of blood platelets.

They argued it could produce serious complications during the procedure, including trouble breathing. They also said her veins were small and difficult to access. If an intravenous line could not be established promptly, they warned repeated attempts could prolong the process. On paper, Tennessee had an execution protocol.

 In court, Pike’s attorneys were asking whether that protocol could create an unacceptable risk in her particular case if you follow the evidence behind difficult true crime cases. Subscribe for careful coverage that keeps the victims and their families in view. Then the argument took a more disturbing turn.

 The defense said the problem was not only medical Moving Pike to the execution unit, monitoring her constantly during her final days, restraining her, and taking away control over her body could, they argued, trigger memories of the abuse she experienced as a child. Trauma specialists supported that concern in a brief submitted to the court.

 Their warning focused on restraint, exposure, and loss of bodily control. These were arguments the court was being asked to assess, not facts already accepted as grounds to halt the execution. Still, the defense had put two difficult questions before Tennessee. Could its chosen method cause unnecessary suffering, and could the procedure itself bring an earlier history of abuse crashing back? The law required the defense to identify alternatives.

One was a smaller needle used by qualified medical personnel. The other was hanging. That second proposal sent the story far beyond a technical courtroom dispute. Tennessee’s last execution of a woman in 1819 had used hanging. Now more than 200 years later, the method was back in the discussion because Pike’s attorneys had included it as an alternative.

 But a dramatic suggestion is not the same as a successful legal challenge. Would the testimony persuade the court that the state’s planned procedure exposed Pike to the level of risk required for intervention? The state supreme court appointed senior judge W. Mark Ward to hear the evidence and report back.

 For 3 days in August, doctors addressed blood counts and veins. Experts discussed trauma. State attorneys defended the procedure. The hearing ended August 13. Around August 21, Ward delivered the finding Pike’s lawyers did not want. He concluded they had failed to establish that the method would expose her to a substantial risk of extreme pain, serious illness, or needless suffering.

 The defense went back to the Tennessee Supreme Court. Seeking to stop the execution, the court refused. Her lawyers publicly expressed disappointment. The arguments had been heard. The date remained. No postponement came out of that hearing. And that rejection pushed the fight toward a different kind of decision. One that did not depend on proving the court had made a legal error.

 The dispute was no longer simply over a needle, a medical condition, or what a witness might see. It had reached the governor himself. A 226-page clemency petition reached Governor Lee in early September. It asked him to replace Pike’s death sentence with life in prison without parole. Why send hundreds of pages to a governor when the courts had already refused to halt the execution? Because clemency is not another trial.

The courts had addressed whether the sentence and procedure could legally stand. The governor had authority to decide whether the punishment should be carried out. He could consider a request for mercy without first finding a new legal defect. For Pike’s supporters, that distinction made Lee’s office the last major destination of their campaign.

 Inside that petition was the story her defense said needed to be considered before the state acted. Her lawyers described abuse and neglect beginning around age two. They pointed to diagnoses made during in imprisonment, including bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. According to the death penalty information center, when the allegations about her childhood were raised in court that summer, state attorneys did not dispute them.

 None of these claims overturned the conviction for Colleen’s murder. The petition made a different argument that the circumstances of Pike’s childhood, her age at the time of the crime, and her years in prison, should affect whether Tennessee executes her. Would the governor see those circumstances as a reason to commute the sentence or leave the jury’s punishment in place? The campaign was no longer confined to her defense team.

United Nations human rights experts called for a halt. More than 100 organizations working against violence joined the appeal. Supporters highlighted a comparison from Tennessee’s modern death penalty history. Eight people had received death sentences for crimes committed at 18. Seven of those sentences were later reduced.

Pike was the one still on death row. They also said she had spent roughly 28 years in solitary confinement, generally locked in her cell for 22 to 23 hours a day. Each detail added weight to the clemency campaign. Yet Lee had indicated the execution would move forward with only 24 hours left.

 Can those arguments still change anything when the person with clemency power has already signaled his position? And then came the headline that almost swallowed the rest of the case. In midepptember, reports said Pike had asked for no men on the team assigned to execute her. Her supporters linked that request to abuse she had suffered as a girl.

 Tennessee had not publicly said whether it would grant it. The request attracted attention for an obvious reason. It involved the last moments of a woman awaiting execution. But notice whose wishes the public was discussing. Pikes, whose experience was being revisited. Pikes, whose name filled the coverage of the legal fight.

Pikes, the victim had a name, too. Colleen Surmer was not an argument in somebody else’s clemency petition. She was the person whose murder sent Pike to death row in the first place. And to understand May Martinez’s plan for September 30, the story has to return to what happened before there was ever a death row appeal.

 Colleen Anne Slimmer was born September 20, 1975 in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Her mother remembered a daughter who liked to be active. Colleen ran marathons, roller skated on weekends, enjoyed babysitting, and loved being around children. She also loved computers. May remembered her as a computer nerd, a detail that says more about a real 19-year-old than an entire stack of execution paperwork.

 In fall 1994, Colleen enrolled in the Knoxville JobCore program, a federally supported route to vocational training and stable work. She left home to learn skills and build a future. Instead, the place that was supposed to help her begin adulthood became the setting of the crime that ended it.

 What turned a training program into a murder investigation? Three other students became central to the case. 18-year-old Christa Pike, her 17-year-old boyfriend to Daryl Ship, and 18-year-old Shadola Peterson. Prosecutors said Pike believed Colleen was interested in ship. The record cited by the original account did not establish that Colleen had any such intention. The distinction matters.

 A suspicion formed in Pike’s mind was not proof of anything Colleen had done. Yet, according to testimony summarized by Tennessee’s Supreme Court, on January 11th, 1995, Pike told another student that she intended to harm Colleen. The next night, January 12, all four were seen leaving the job course center together.

A little more than 2 hours later, only three returned. Colleen was missing. The following morning, a University of Tennessee custodian found her near an abandoned steam plant at the edge of the university’s agricultural campus. The investigation did not have to rely on rumor about a boy boyfriend. Students told investigators Pike had spoken about the crime and had kept an item from that night.

 Detectives recovered the item from a jacket identified as hers. It became a significant part of the prosecution’s evidence. Consider that sequence, a prior statement about hurting Colleen. Four people leaving together. Three returning. A young woman found dead the following morning. Then statements from fellow students and physical evidence recovered during the investigation.

The courtroom story would have to confront that sequence, not just the supposed rivalry that preceded it. What did that evidence mean for Pike when the case reached a Knox County jury in 1996? The jury convicted her of firstdegree murder and sentenced her to death. She was 20 when sentenced and was widely described at the time as the youngest woman on death row in the United States.

Ship was 17 when the crime occurred, too young under the law to receive a death sentence. After jurors could not agree on his punishment, he received life with the possibility of parole plus another 25 years. Peterson pleaded guilty as an accessory after the fact and received probation.

 Their legal outcomes were different. Colleen’s outcome could never change. She was 19 when she left that campus and never came home, nor did the prison years end the headlines around Pike. In 2001, she attacked another inmate, Patricia Jones. In 2004, she was convicted of attempted first-degree murder.

 In 2012, authorities uncovered an escape plot involving correctional officer Justin Heftlin, who was fired, and Donald Kohut of New Jersey, who received a 7-year sentence for his role. Those developments added more chapters to the public record about Pike. But what was happening to Colleen’s family through all those years? There is an answer and it challenges the idea that the original verdict gave them an uncomplicated ending.

When May attended the murder trial, she expected testimony about her daughter. She did not expect parts of Colleen’s remains to appear as evidence in court. She later described how hard that was to accept. The trial ended, but the state retained some remains while appeals continued. May asked for their return.

She waited. She kept asking. 16 years passed before they were returned. According to her account, they finally arrived through the mail without advanced warning and she received them alone. She was advised to seek counseling. May has said she believed the state should answer for the way her family had been treated.

 It was not only the murder she had to survive. There were years in which she still could not put this part of her daughter’s remains to rest. A murder conviction had been entered years earlier. Why was a mother still fighting for the return of what remained of her daughter? There was another unresolved matter.

 An item taken from the scene had still not been returned. Nearly 20 years after the crime, May was publicly requesting it so Colleen could be laid to rest. reporting at the time said the item was being retained until the case ended. May now says it has been lost. That is her account. The source does not establish where the item went, but the burden she describes is unmistakable.

While the public followed challenges to Pike’s punishment, Colleen’s mother was still dealing with the handling of evidence connected to her daughter. The consequences of the crime had not stopped with the sentencing hearing. That history gives a sharp edge to what May said when reporters asked about Pike’s medical arguments, trauma claims, and the suggestion of hanging.

 May maintained that Pike should face the punishment imposed for her crime. The disagreement is not difficult to locate. Pike’s advocates point to a childhood of abuse, a crime committed at 18. later diagnosis and decades of severe isolation. May points back to her daughter, to the murder conviction, and to the decades her family has already spent waiting.

They are talking about the same case, but they are asking the public to look at very different parts of it. And the question cutting through every new clemency headline is this. How often must Colleen’s family tell her story before it is heard alongside Pikes? The cost of that persistence has been painfully practical.

 May and her husband Raul have been preparing for another trip from Florida to Tennessee. They had made the journey for hearings, rulings, and other proceedings before. Raul is a disabled veteran. The couple lives on retirement income. Each drive takes about 10 to 11 hours in one direction. Then come gas, meals, three nights in a hotel, and someone to care for their pets while they are away.

 They told a Knoxville news station. They told a Knoxville news station they received no financial assistance from the state. They even considered skipping a month’s mortgage payment if that was what it took to be present. A local organization was reportedly helping raise money. Why should a family still be calculating whether it can afford to attend a proceeding tied to the loss of its daughter 31 years earlier? May’s decision does not hinge on the cost.

 She intends to be there. She has described her role for years as being Colleen’s voice and September made this particular journey even harder. On September 20, Colleen would have turned 51. 10 days after that birthday comes tomorrow’s scheduled execution. One date marked the life Colleen should have been able to keep living.

 The other marked the state’s planned final act in the case. For television viewers, September 30 is a date on a news graphic. For May, tomorrow is another day. She must arrange her life around the crime that took her daughter. May has said September also carries memories of other losses for her family. This year, those dates landed together.

What does a mother do with a 51st birthday when the photographs of her daughter stop at 19? There would be no new portrait of Colleen at 51, no account of the work she might have done with computers, no memories from the decades she was denied. The source gives us the interests she actually had. It cannot tell us the future she would have chosen.

 That absence is precisely why the photograph matters. It is not an attempt to improve on the evidence or to add a dramatic scene to the execution. It is May’s stated plan. She intends to take Colleen’s picture so Pike can see the person whose life she took. She does not plan to deliver a speech. Raul may speak, she has said, but she will not.

After 31 years, she has settled on something more immediate than another statement. And there is a reason she does not expect words to do the work. May says she has never received an apology from Pike, whether during the trial and appeals or through later messages and statements. That is May’s account, not an invented exchange between the two women.

 What would an apology change now? It could not return Colleen or erase the years spent trying to recover evidence and attend hearings. May’s intended gesture instead makes a different demand. That the woman convicted of killing Colleen look at the face of the person behind the case. The photograph is small. The history attached to it is not.

 Now, the final 24-hour countdown has begun, and two processes are still moving at once. State officials are preparing the prison and the witness arrangements. The seven selected journalists and two alternates have their assigned roles. Pike’s defense may still pursue lastminute legal avenues, including in federal court.

 Governor Lee has said he will not intervene yet. The scheduled hour has not arrived and further court action could still affect what happens tomorrow. Will another filing reach a court in time? What will the final legal decisions mean for the people preparing to enter that chamber? The information available for this account does not establish the outcome of any remaining challenge.

 Meanwhile, May and Raul face the cost of another long journey north. And May still intends to carry Colleen’s photograph. This is the part no execution protocol can capture. One woman was asking Tennessee to consider her life before deciding whether to end it. Another woman was asking that her daughter’s life not disappear beneath that debate.

Colleen Slimmer loved computers, skating, marathons, and caring for children. She went to Knoxville looking for a future. She was killed at 19. Whatever happened with Pike’s final appeals, May would still be the mother who had spent 31’s years insisting that the world remember whose life was taken first.