Christa Gail Pike's lawyers have sent Tennessee Governor Bill Lee a childhood photo of Pike alongside a petition for clemency, in a final attempt to stop her execution scheduled for September 30. Pike, now the only woman on Tennessee's death row, was convicted at 18 of the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a fellow student at a Knoxville job training program, after prosecutors said Pike had grown jealous believing Slemmer was pursuing her boyfriend. She was sentenced to death in 1996 and her execution, originally set for electrocution, has now been scheduled for lethal injection nearly three decades later.
Pike's lawyer, Randall J. Spivey, described a specific photo of Pike as a young child in his letter to the governor, writing that she is pictured outside with curly red hair slightly blown by the wind and big brown eyes, her mouth drawn tight in a straight line. He explained the photo was taken around the time Pike was first sexually abused, calling it a devastatingly sad turning point where the chaos surrounding her childhood began leaving marks she couldn't overcome. Pike's legal team has argued she suffered severe physical and sexual abuse as a child at the hands of her grandmother's boyfriend, and that this history, along with untreated mental health issues, was never fully presented to the jury during her original trial due to inadequate legal representation at the time.
Experts from Amnesty International and the UN have echoed those concerns, with Amnesty's Justin Mazzola saying she endured profound abuse and trauma as a child and had serious mental disabilities that were never adequately addressed or treated, and that it's unthinkable the governor would move forward with the execution given everything now known. Governor Lee granted clemency to 34 people in late August, but has not granted it to Pike.
