Tennessee death row inmate Christa Pike is days away from a scheduled execution, and her lawyers have made an unusual request about who may enter the room with her.

They want every correctional officer inside the death chamber to be a woman.

The request comes as Pike, 50, faces execution by lethal injection at 10 a.m. Central on September 30 at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.

The New York Post reports that Pike’s attorneys tied the request to her diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder and a childhood marked by repeated sexual abuse by men. Her legal team argues that male officers restraining and preparing her for lethal injection could cause severe re-traumatization in her final minutes.

That argument does not erase the reason Pike is on death row. It sits beside a crime of extraordinary brutality, and 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer must not disappear from this story.

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Pike and Slemmer were students at the Knoxville Job Corps in January 1995. Prosecutors said Pike became convinced Slemmer was trying to take her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, and helped lure the young woman to an isolated area near the University of Tennessee agricultural campus.

Slemmer was beaten, cut and tortured before she was killed. Court records say Pike later showed another student a piece of Slemmer’s skull that she had taken from the scene.

A jury convicted Pike of first-degree murder and conspiracy in 1996 and sentenced her to death. Shipp, who was 17 when the crime occurred, received a life sentence rather than death.

The case has returned to public attention as Tennessee moves toward what would be its first execution of a woman in more than two centuries. Pike’s former defense attorney has also said a plea agreement could have taken the death penalty off the table, but that the defense team advised her not to accept it.

The Tennessee Supreme Court set the September 30 date in a September 2025 order after the state said Pike had completed the standard three-tier appeals process. Pike asked the court to refuse the date and send Governor Bill Lee a certificate of commutation based on what her lawyers described as extenuating circumstances.

The justices denied that request. Their order said no legal reason existed against carrying out the sentence and that Pike had not shown circumstances warranting the court’s certificate.

It directed the warden at Riverbend, or the warden’s designee, to execute the sentence on September 30 unless another court or an appropriate authority intervenes. The order also required the prison to notify Pike of the method that would be used.

The official Tennessee Department of Correction advisory says the execution remains scheduled at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution. Media check-in will begin at 7:30 a.m. Central on September 30, and reporters will be barred from entering the prison parking lot after 8:30 a.m.

The department has selected seven official media witnesses and one alternate from eight applications submitted by Tennessee news organizations. Its rules confine reporters to designated areas around Riverbend and require credentials and photo identification.

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Those logistical preparations show that the state is moving forward while Pike’s clemency request and remaining litigation continue. Her request for an all-female chamber staff is therefore not an abstract concern; it is aimed at a procedure now less than two weeks away.

Pike has also challenged Tennessee’s one-drug lethal-injection process. Her attorneys say thrombocytosis—a condition involving elevated blood platelets—could complicate IV access and increase the danger of a prolonged, painful death.

A Death Penalty Information Center summary of the August hearing says Pike’s team proposed a modified injection procedure or hanging as alternatives. Tennessee answered that her veins have been accessed successfully, her platelet count presents little added risk, pentobarbital would render her unconscious before severe pain, and the state is neither equipped nor legally authorized to conduct a hanging.

Those arguments are separate from Pike’s request for female staff, but they arise from the same last-minute fight over how—and whether—the state will carry out the sentence.

Pike’s lawyers have submitted a 226-page clemency petition asking Governor Bill Lee to commute her death sentence to life in prison without parole. The petition emphasizes abuse, mental illness, brain development at age 18 and what her attorneys describe as decades of change behind bars.

WSMV/WVLT reported that Lee holds the sole constitutional authority to grant clemency in this case. The petition asks him to replace Pike’s death sentence with life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, so clemency would not free her from prison.

The filing arrived at Lee’s office on September 2. It asks him to weigh evidence of Pike’s childhood abuse, bipolar disorder, PTSD and brain development at the time of the murder against the punishment imposed by the jury.

The governor is not bound by the Tennessee Supreme Court’s refusal to issue its own certificate of commutation, but his decision must come before the scheduled execution if it is to change the outcome. No decision had been announced as of Tuesday morning.

The coming days therefore leave two different questions in the governor’s hands and the state’s machinery: whether Pike will be executed at all, and if the execution proceeds, whether Tennessee will honor her request to have only women in the chamber.

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The legal system will decide what weight to give Pike’s trauma and medical claims. But the public record should remain clear about the person whose life was taken in 1995: Colleen Slemmer was 19 years old, and she endured a calculated, savage attack that ended her life.

That is where the story began. Whatever happens on September 30, it cannot become a footnote.

This is a Guest Post from our friends over at WLTReport. View the original article here.

 

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