JUST IN: Christa Pike’s Attorneys Want Her Hanged — Tennessee’s Only Woman On Death Row

JUST IN: Christa Pike’s Attorneys Want Her Hanged — Tennessee’s Only Woman On Death Row

Christa will involuntarily experience this superadded terror and psychological pain as the state executes her.

Christa Pike, the woman who was convicted of killing her classmate Colleen Slemmer in 1995, is the only woman on Tennessee’s death row, and she’s looking to change the way she’ll be put to death.

Now, this other alternative, the testimony in this court demonstrates, is a very old practice. It’s something that execution by hanging has been around for, I think, thousands of years.

Pike’s lawyers argue she needs a different method of execution because of a blood condition, PTSD and trauma, small veins for IV lines, and whether two other methods would cause her less pain.

The courtroom is in Knoxville, Tennessee. The woman whose life is being discussed is 180 miles away watching it on a screen. And on the morning of Tuesday, August the 11th, 2026, her own attorneys stand up in Knox County Criminal Court and ask the state of Tennessee to hang her—not to spare her, to hang her.

Welcome to The Last Sentence. Today, we are looking at the case of Christa Gail Pike, the only woman on Tennessee’s death row. Before we begin, subscribe to the channel and tell us in the comments where you are watching from. Now, let us get into it.

Senior Judge W. Mark Ward is presiding, appointed by the Tennessee Supreme Court to serve as special master. Christa Pike, now 50 years old, is not in the room. She appears by video from the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center in Nashville. Her attorneys are Luke Inman and Stephen Ferrell of Federal Defender Services of East Tennessee. They tell the court what method they want the state to use on their client.

Now, this other alternative, the testimony in this court demonstrates, is a very old practice. It’s something that execution by hanging has been around for, I think, thousands of years.

Pike’s lawyers argue she needs a different method of execution because of a blood condition, PTSD and trauma, small veins for IV lines, and whether two other methods would cause her less pain.

The Supreme Court referred five issues, now four, to this court to help inform its determination of whether or not to grant a stay of execution so that Ms. Pike could pursue collateral litigation that may affect the method and timing of her execution.

Kenneth Nelson, the warden of Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, where Tennessee’s execution chamber sits, answers plainly, “The state does not have the equipment. It is not approved by Tennessee law. They would not be able to support it.”

Judge Ward sets the frame in his own words: “This is not collateral litigation. The Supreme Court has listed five things it needs to know.” He supplies the facts. They make the decision. But the reason her lawyers asked for the rope is not what the headlines have been telling you this week. The answer does not start in this courtroom at all. It starts in an execution chamber in Nashville three months earlier on a night in May when something went badly wrong.

Before this becomes a case, before the appeals and the execution date, it is a girl from Florida. Colleen Ann Slemmer was born on the 20th of September, 1975, in Orange Park, Florida, outside Jacksonville. She grew up with her mother, May Martinez, her stepfather, and a younger sister. By the accounts that survive her, she was quiet and kind, and she had volunteered with Special Olympics. She was 19. She was living at the Knoxville Job Corps Center on Dale Avenue, a federally funded residential program where young adults train for work.

Three other people on that campus matter here:

• Christa Gail Pike, born the 10th of March, 1976, in Beckley, West Virginia, to Carissa Hansen and Emil Glenn Pike, two months short of 19.

• Taddeo Ship, 17, from Memphis, Pike’s boyfriend.

• Shidalla Peterson, 18.

The motive in the court record is jealousy. Pike believed Colleen was a rival for Ship’s attention. Those who knew Colleen said she had no interest in him. It made no difference.

On Wednesday, the 11th of January, 1995, Pike told another student, Kim Eiloilo, that she intended to kill Colleen Slemmer. Eiloilo asked why. Pike said she had just felt mean that day. That exchange sits in the proof the state presented at trial in State v. Pike. Before leaving the next evening, court documents show Pike pocketed a box cutter and a small meat cleaver.

Thursday, the 12th of January, 1995. At approximately 8:00 in the evening, Eiloilo watched Pike, Colleen, Peterson, and Ship walk away from the center towards 17th Street. Their destination was a remote corner of the University of Tennessee Agricultural Campus near Tyson Park and an abandoned steam plant. The pretext was marijuana.

What happened there lasted roughly 30 minutes by Pike’s own later estimate. A pentagram was carved. The fatal injury was inflicted with a chunk of asphalt. That is as far as this channel will go.

At approximately 10:15, Eiloilo watched three of them return. Colleen was not with them. Pike had taken a fragment of Colleen’s skull. In the days that followed, she showed it to others and bragged about what she had done. That is what ended it, she told people. Pike was apprehended on the 14th of January, 1995. She confessed. DNA recovered from clothing corroborated her account. 19 years old. Two weeks into the new year.

Before we go further, tell us in the comments: Can jealousy over a 17-year-old boy ever explain what happened on that campus? Or is that word carrying weight it was never able to carry?

Three people walked onto that campus with Colleen Slemmer. Three walked off it. What the courts did with them afterward is the part of this case people still argue about.

March 1996, Knox County Criminal Court. Christa Pike has just turned 20. As the verdict is read, she looks toward her mother. On the 30th of March, 1996, she is sentenced to death plus 25 years for conspiracy. As the sentence is delivered, she sobs and calls out for her mother. She becomes the youngest woman sentenced to death in the modern era of American capital punishment. She’s also the only one of the three ever capitally charged.

Taddeo Ship was tried separately. A Knox County jury convicted him in 1997: life with the possibility of parole plus 25 years. He could not have faced death because he was 17 on the night of the killing. He has been in custody since January 1995. On the 8th of October, 2025, Ship, then 47, had his first parole hearing at the Northwest Correctional Complex in Tiptonville, part of a broader docket, according to board spokesman Dustin Krugel.

May Martinez, Colleen’s mother, did not know he had become eligible. She found out when a Knoxville television station contacted her. On the 20th of October, 2025, the Tennessee Board of Parole declined. Four member votes reached the decision. Board member Tim Gobble voted to deny, citing the seriousness of the murder. The board recommended Ship complete programming and maintain positive institutional behavior. His case is set for review again in 2031.

Then there is Shidallah Peterson. Prosecutors offered no proof she assaulted Colleen Slemmer. She pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact, turned informant, and testified against both Pike and Ship. She received probation. She walked.

Three teenagers, one campus, one night. Pike’s record did not stop in 1996. On the 24th of August, 2001, at the Deborah K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center in Nashville, she attempted to strangle a fellow inmate, Patricia Jones, with a shoestring. She was convicted in 2004. Twenty-five more years were added.

And in 2012, investigators uncovered a plot to break her out. Justin Heflin, 23, a former correctional officer at the Tennessee Prison for Women, was charged with bribery, conspiracy to commit escape, and facilitation to commit escape. He was held in the Davidson County Jail on a $75,000 bond. Kristen Helm of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation said there was no imminent danger of an escape, but she said there was a plan in the works and money changing hands.

Thirty-one years of lawyers and appeals, all of them arguing over whether Tennessee should be allowed to kill Christa Pike. And for a stretch in the middle of it, the person fighting hardest to have Christa Pike executed was Christa Pike.

In June of 2001, against the direct advice of her own lawyers, Christa Pike went to the Tennessee courts and asked them to stop—not the execution, the appeal. She wanted the process ended, and she named the method she wanted used on her: the electric chair. Her lawyers told her not to. She did it anyway.

In June of 2002, she asked again. Criminal Court Judge Mary Beth Leibowitz granted the request. An execution date was set for the 19th of August, 2002. Christa Pike had chosen how she was going to die, and Tennessee had agreed.

Then she changed her mind. On the 8th of July, 2002, her lawyers moved to allow the appeal to continue. Denied. On the 2nd of August, 2002, a three-judge state appeals panel ruled the proceeding should continue after all. The execution was not carried out.

Hold that because it is the shape of this whole case. Twenty-four years ago, Christa Pike asked a Tennessee courtroom for the electric chair. This month, in another Tennessee courtroom, her attorneys argued the method the state chose for her would be unconstitutional.

What her lawyers have argued in the years between comes down to who she was before any of it: childhood physical and sexual abuse, neglect, bipolar disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder, neither diagnosed until years after her arrest. That record is public. Cornell Law School’s Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide hosts the file. A report from Dr. Jonathan Pincus, professor of neurology at Georgetown, describes an almost unbearably abusive background. Reports from Dr. Bethany Brand and Dr. George Woods, an affidavit from Dr. Ollie Winters, and a petition submitted on her behalf to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights are also included. The same file contains the guilty plea of a man convicted of raping Christa Pike when she was 11 years old.

Pike herself has said there is no excuse for what she did, that she takes full responsibility, and that she regrets everything that happened. Her attorneys pointed to a Tennessee Supreme Court ruling, State v. Booker, which held mandatory life sentences for juveniles violate the Eighth Amendment. Knox County Criminal Court Judge Scott Green denied the motion, ruling Booker applied only to juveniles. Attorney Kelly Gleason confirmed an appeal. The Tennessee Supreme Court later declined to hear her challenge based on youth and abuse.

Days after that, attorneys Kelly Gleason and Randy Spivey secured a settlement moving her out of what they called de facto solitary confinement after more than 25 years. She works now. She shares some meals with a small group of women. She is still the only woman on Tennessee’s death row.

So, tell us below: She asked to be executed and the state agreed. She changed her mind, and the courts let her keep fighting. Twenty-four years later, she is still here. Did the system work, or did it do something else?

To understand why Christa Pike’s lawyers asked for a rope, go back three months to a different prison and a different condemned man: Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, Nashville. The 21st of May, 2026. Tony Carruthers.

There are two accounts, both on the record. The Tennessee Department of Correction said in writing that medical personnel quickly established a primary intravenous line, but could not establish the backup line the protocol requires. Maria DeLiberato, an ACLU attorney, watched it. On the 11th of August, she testified in Knox County that guards dressed like a SWAT team forcibly removed Carruthers from his cell and strapped him to a gurney. She said the team worked more than 30 minutes, that he was stuck more than a dozen times in his arms, his hands, and his feet, and that he was wincing and appeared to be in pain. She described blood at a puncture wound. The attempt was called off. Governor Bill Lee granted Carruthers a one-year reprieve.

This was not Tennessee’s first problem. The state had already paused executions for three years after discovering it was not properly testing its lethal injection drugs for purity and potency. An independent review found none of the drugs prepared for the seven inmates executed since 2018 had been fully tested. The current protocol—a single drug, pentobarbital—took effect in December 2024, built through a multi-year review Lee ordered in 2022 after what the state called an oversight in preparations.

On the 25th of June, 2026, nine Tennessee Republican state senators wrote to Lee. They asked for an independent review of the failed execution, correction of every deficiency found, and public release of information about the execution team so the department’s readiness could be independently verified. They made clear they still support capital punishment.

There are two cases running at once. On the 8th of January, 2026, Pike filed in Davidson County Chancery Court challenging the protocol as unconstitutional and in conflict with her religious beliefs. She identifies as Buddhist. The suit named Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, Commissioner Frank Strada, Warden Kenneth Nelson, and Warden Jordan Clark. Both sides have since agreed she may have a spiritual advisor in the chamber.

Then in June, after Carruthers, Luke Inman and Stephen Farrell filed a motion that produced this hearing, arguing the state is not equipped to execute her consistently with the United States and Tennessee constitutions, citing her unique physical, medical, and psychological conditions.

Which brings us to the rope. Hanging is not what they asked for first. What they asked for first was a central line—the drug delivered through a large central vein rather than a smaller vein in the arm. That creates a problem because central lines are placed by physicians, and physicians typically refuse to knowingly take part in an execution.

Hanging enters because of a rule: A prisoner challenging a method is required to propose an alternative. Their filed reasoning is that Tennessee’s last execution of a woman was carried out by hanging, that the method has never been declared unconstitutional, and that even badly administered, the worst case is roughly 20 seconds of pain set against lethal injection risks, including lung damage that can produce a drowning sensation until death.

The medical fight ran across the 12th and 13th of August. Farrell told the court that autopsies of two Tennessee inmates executed under the current protocol both showed pulmonary edema. The state answered every point. Its blood expert testified her recent platelet counts sit between 400,000 and 500,000, low risk for a flare-up. Dr. Joseph Antognini appeared for the state, whose lethal injection evidence was cited by the United States Supreme Court in Bucklew. Judge Ward questioned him on his sources regarding hanging. The state’s brief said her claims fall far short of showing serious illness or needless suffering. The state’s final witness called her a standard patient with accessible veins.

Her attorneys also sought a guarantee on the gender of the execution team. Neither testifying official could say how many female corrections officers work under them. The state does not dispute her trauma history. And underneath it, one number: Since 1978, nearly 200 Tennessee women have been convicted of first-degree murder. None received death.

Judge Ward made one ruling worth remembering: He barred any inquiry into the medical qualifications or identities of past execution teams. Who they were was off-limits.

Three days later, the public found out who would be in that chamber next. It did not come from the courtroom. Friday, the 14th of August, 2026, the day after the hearing closed, a doctor named Mark Fowler confirmed to Nashville media that he will serve as the physician for Christa Pike’s execution. That name meant nothing to most people who read it. It should have. Dr. Mark Fowler was involved in the failed execution attempt on Tony Carruthers in May. And there is one more thing from a deposition he gave previously: Dr. Fowler said he had not placed a central line in more than a decade.

Sit with that. Christa Pike’s attorneys are asking Tennessee to use a central line. It is their first choice, the option they put ahead of the rope. The physician assigned to her execution has not placed one in 10 years. Fowler’s own public statement is that inmates condemned to die are treated with utmost courtesy, respect, and professionalism by staff.

If you have made it this far, subscribe. This case does not end with this video. There is a ruling coming and a date in September. Fowler is not the only medical voice here. Dozens of Tennessee doctors and nurses have called on the state to pause executions until the Department of Correction can show its process has improved. A former Tennessee execution official has urged the governor to pause them as well over the toll the process takes on staff.

The state has not slowed down. Less than three months after the Carruthers attempt was called off, Tennessee executed Anthony Darrell Hines. Days before, Governor Bill Lee announced he would not grant Hines clemency.

There is one voice in this that has been quieter than the rest. May Martinez, Colleen Slemmer’s mother, said in 2025 that there is nothing that can really bring you peace and nothing that will feel like justice has been served. Her daughter has been gone 31 years. Other grieving families in Nashville have said the same in recent days. Whatever happens next, the focus should stay on the victims. Tell us in the comments where you land: After 31 years, does any of this look like justice, or does it look like something else?

Here’s where it stands: Three days of testimony closed on the 13th of August. Judge Ward answers four of the five questions the Tennessee Supreme Court put to him, three concerning her health. His findings are due Friday, the 21st of August. Both sides may file objections by the 28th. The Supreme Court then decides whether to grant a stay, change the method, or let it proceed.

Pike has not filed for clemency, and there is no public confirmation of a formal petition to Governor Lee. Advocacy petitions have gathered thousands of signatures.

So, this is the standoff. Tennessee says it cannot carry out the method her lawyers want. Her lawyers say it cannot safely carry out the one it has. One of those has to give, and there are weeks to decide it.

Unless a court moves, the 30th of September, 2026, stands. On that date, Christa Gail Pike becomes the first woman executed in Tennessee since 1819, and the only person put to death in this state for a crime committed at 18, 19, or 20 in the modern era.

30 September. That is the date to watch.