Christa Pike, scheduled to be executed in Tennessee on 30 September, has requested that only female corrections staff be present in the death chamber, should her clemency and legal appeals ultimately fail.
Pike, 50, has been on death row for nearly three decades since being found guilty of murdering 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in Knoxville in 1995, and was sentenced to death the following year. If her execution proceeds, she will become the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.
Her legal team has pursued several avenues to stop the execution, including arguing she has a medical condition that would make lethal injection unnecessarily painful, though Senior Judge Mark Ward ruled the condition would not prevent staff from starting an IV. Matt Wells, Deputy Director of Reprieve US, has separately warned there is a "high risk" Pike could face "a prolonged and agonizing death." Her lawyers also filed a clemency petition with Governor Bill Lee's office on 2 September, asking him to commute her sentence to life without the possibility of parole, describing her as having grown from a traumatised teenager into a generous, empathetic woman capable of helping others. Governor Lee has not yet responded to the petition.
According to The Guardian, should clemency not be granted, Pike's request for an all-female execution team is tied to her history of sexual abuse at the hands of men. She is reportedly terrified at the prospect of being physically restrained on the gurney by male staff during her execution.
Pike recently featured in a documentary titled Christa Pike's Last Fight to Stop Her Execution, in which she described the toll of awaiting her execution date, saying: "I know I said I believed a date would never be set, but now that one has been set, it's like a roulette wheel of thought and your actual brain is the ball bouncing around. My nerves are shredded. When I do sleep, my brain eats itself." She added: "I have the most horrible nightmares, but I think what has been worse is that they told me a year ahead of time. And so, every day I've woken up and lived that thought all day, every day, every waking moment."
