Death row inmate Christa Pike wants an all-women lethal injection team for her Tennessee execution this week, citing male-abuse trauma the victim's mother calls special treatment.
Breitbart News reported that Pike, now 50, is scheduled to die by lethal injection on September 30 and has asked for an all-female team to carry out the sentence. Her lawyers say men on the team could worsen trauma tied to PTSD from abuse by males. If the state cannot meet that demand, she will ask to be hanged instead.
Her legal team is also pressing Republican Gov. Bill Lee for clemency that would commute the death sentence to life without parole. Pike was the first woman sentenced to death in Tennessee in 200 years, and one of the youngest women ever sent to death row in the United States.
The victim’s mother wants none of it. May Martinez told reporters she rejects any special handling for the woman who helped torture and kill her daughter.
Pike’s attorneys filed a lengthy clemency petition that frames her as a product of failed systems rather than a calculating killer. In that filing they wrote that she was shaped by abuse and misdiagnosis at every turn.
"Christa was broken, not evil... broken by a mental health system, juvenile system, and a criminal justice system that ignored, misdiagnosed, and mistreated her at every turn."
The petition runs 226 pages and details claimed sexual abuse from ages 2 to 5, later rapes at 11 and 17, plus diagnoses of bipolar disorder and PTSD. Lawyers argue jurors never heard the full mitigating picture. Reporting on the case notes that no evidence of past sexual abuse was presented to the jury at trial.
That history is now being used to justify both clemency and an all-female execution crew. The request arrives days before the warrant date, after three decades on death row.
On January 12, 1995, Pike and her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, lured fellow Job Corps student Colleen Slemmer to an isolated spot on the University of Tennessee campus in Knoxville. Pike dangled a planned trip to a Blockbuster video store as the bait. Slemmer was 19. Pike was connected to the case as an 18-year-old. Shipp was 17.
Court records describe a prolonged attack. They beat Slemmer, slashed her throat, and carved Satanic symbols into her body. Pike reportedly celebrated the killing the next day.
At the time, Pike claimed Slemmer had been trying to hook up with her boyfriend and “running her mouth.” That was the stated motive offered around the crime. Slemmer never made it home.
On March 30, 1996, a jury convicted Pike of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder and sentenced her to death. Shipp received life because he was only 17 when the murder happened. Pike has remained on death row ever since.
May Martinez has watched the case for thirty years. When news of the all-women team request and clemency push surfaced, she answered directly. In comments carried by the New York Post, she rejected the idea that Pike deserves tailored conditions at the end.
"I don’t think she should be allowed to have any special treatment."
Martinez went further on the timing and the claims now being pressed in court papers and public statements.
"She didn’t consider how my daughter felt, she’s just playing the system... It’s all bullcrap."
Those words cut against the petition’s portrait of a woman failed by every institution. Martinez’s point is simpler: her daughter received no mercy, no choice of who stood over her, and no last-minute rewrite of the rules.
Tennessee still holds the September 30 execution date. Pike’s team wants Gov. Lee to step in with a commutation. Separately, they want the lethal injection protocol staffed only by women, or a switch to hanging if that staffing request fails.
State officials have not been quoted in the available reporting with a final public answer on either the team composition or the clemency ask. The warrant stands. The crime facts stand. The jury’s 1996 judgment stands unless the governor changes it.
Pike entered custody as a teenager and turns toward the death chamber as a 50-year-old woman. The intervening years produced appeals, diagnoses, and now a detailed plea that the systems around her failed first. None of that alters what happened to Colleen Slemmer on the Knoxville campus in 1995, or the recorded brutality that followed the lure to that isolated spot.
Law-and-order cases often end with late claims of trauma and institutional failure. Here the record already shows a first-degree murder conviction, a death sentence, a co-defendant who got life because of his age, and a mother still waiting for the sentence to be carried out without extras.
Justice delayed is still justice owed. Special staffing demands and last-ditch clemency bids do not erase a throat slashed or symbols carved into a 19-year-old’s body. The warrant should be enforced as written.
