Image Credit: TN Dept of Corrections & Canva.
***Note from The Tennessee Conservative – this article posted here for informational purposes only.
Article by Kim Jarrett, The Center Square –
Christa Pike was 18 years old when she was charged in the 1995 death of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in Knoxville.
Thirty-one years and a murder conviction later, the execution of Tennessee’s only female inmate on death row is sparking protests and campaigns to save her life. She is to be executed Wednesday.
Slemmer’s mother is planning to be in Nashville for Pike’s execution. She told Nashville’s WBIR that the publicity surrounding Pike, now 50, has taken the attention off of her daughter.
“It’s never about the victims,” Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, told the television station. “It’s like Colleen was never there.”
The Tennessee Supreme Court refused to stay Pike’s execution this week. Pike’s attorneys asked Gov. Bill Lee to commute Pike’s sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Lee has refused clemency petitions in two other executions this year. But the governor granted a one-year reprieve to Tony Carruthers, who survived an execution when the Tennessee Department of Corrections said doctors could not find a second IV line.
Carruthers was convicted in 1996 for the murders of Marcellos Anderson, his mother Delois Anderson, and Frederick Tucker. Their bodies were found in a Memphis cemetery.
Pike’s attorneys and death penalty opponents raised concerns about Carruthers’ failed execution before Anthony Darrell Hines was executed on Aug. 13 for the 1985 murder of Catherine Jenkins, a motel maid in Kingston Springs. A group of medical professionals is planning a panel discussion about the death penalty in Nashville, over concerns about the state’s lethal execution protocol.
“Although as a group we take no position on capital punishment, each of us was horrified by the torturous treatment of Mr. Carruthers,” the doctors said in a letter to Lee provided by the U.S. Campaign to End the Death Penalty. “If Tennessee is going to continue executing prisoners, it must find a way to do so that does not inflict severe pain and suffering on the person being executed and does not require the involvement of medical professionals contrary to their ethical obligations.”
In Pike’s case, they are also raising questions about her age and the abuse they say happened to her before Slemmer’s murder.
“Christa’s life prior to the crime was shaped by the actions of adults who lacked the understanding and capacity to keep her safe from horrible abuse and harm,” stated Barbara Nixon, a licensed clinical social worker, in a statement. “They were unable to provide the protection, care, and accountability that a child needs. This does not excuse Christa’s crime, but it helps to contextualize it as a tragic outcome of a child’s life defined by violence.”
Besides Slemmer’s murder, Pike was also convicted of attempted murder in 2001 for an assault on inmate Patricia Jones, according to the Tennessee Department of Corrections.
