Experts and anti-death penalty campaigners are making a last-ditch attempt to prevent the execution of Christa Gail Pike, scheduled to be carried out in Tennessee on 30 September.

Her legal challenge

Pike's lawyers challenged the state's lethal injection procedure, arguing her medical and psychological history could make the execution unconstitutional. They pointed to her diagnosis of thrombocytosis, a condition involving an abnormally high platelet count, arguing that proceeding could breach the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. Her team also raised concerns tied to childhood sexual abuse and diagnoses of PTSD and bipolar disorder, specifically citing the potential psychological distress of being restrained to a gurney, observed by male prison staff, and having an intravenous line inserted near her chest or groin.

What the court ruled

The Tennessee Supreme Court rejected the challenge, finding Pike hadn't demonstrated her medical condition would render the execution unconstitutional. However, the state agreed to several accommodations in response to her concerns, including having female correctional officers transport her to Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, ensuring only female staff observe her where possible, providing a privacy screen while showering or using the bathroom, and allowing her to meet with a spiritual adviser in the 12 hours before her execution, with that adviser potentially permitted inside the execution chamber itself.

What happens next

Pike's legal team has said it intends to ask the US Supreme Court to intervene, while continuing to petition Governor Bill Lee for clemency, seeking to have her sentence commuted to life without parole.

Background on her case

Pike, now 50, is the only woman currently on Tennessee's death row, sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a fellow student at the Knoxville Job Corps Center. Pike, then 18, lured Slemmer to an isolated location where she was beaten, stabbed, and disfigured. Her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, 17 at the time and therefore ineligible for the death penalty, received a life sentence instead. Pike's lawyers have argued her childhood, marked by sexual abuse, rape, and neglect, along with her later diagnoses of bipolar disorder and PTSD, should factor into her sentence. She was also convicted of attempted first-degree murder following a separate 2001 attack on another prisoner while incarcerated.