Tennessee woman sentenced to death after 200 years: lethal injection for 18-year-old murderer Christa Pike

New York – She was only 18 when she killed a classmate in a fit of jealousy, becoming one of the youngest women to end up on death row.

On the eve of the lethal injection for Christa Pike, now 50, the US media is rekindling the controversy surrounding the execution of the woman sentenced at age 18 for a crime that landed her on death row. Tomorrow, 200 years after the last execution of a woman in Tennessee in 1820, she will be given the lethal injection. Christa Pike is the first woman in modern US history to die for a crime committed when she was just 18.

Pike and her then-boyfriend, 17-year-old Tadaryl Shipp, were convicted in 1995 for the murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, their classmate at the Knoxville Job Corps. Shipp and another young man who participated in the crime are now eligible for parole and probation.

"If Christa were a year younger, she too would be preparing for a pardon hearing," the Times notes, "rather than facing the executioner" after Governor Bill Lee rejected the pardon yesterday. The case caused an outcry due to the brutality of the murder , the young age of those involved, and the fact that a satanic symbol had been carved into the victim's body. The training school closed soon after the crime. Christa ended up on death row the following year.

The Supreme Court recognized in 2005 that 18 is not a clear cutoff for executing a person: “The differences between adolescents and adults do not magically disappear the day someone turns 18,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy, but he set that age on the basis that “some limit must be drawn.”

Pressure continues from anti-death penalty movements, claiming that Christa Pike's neurological immaturity is compounded by the trauma she suffered: raped as a child, then at 11 and again at 17, brutally beaten by her father, and starved by her mother.

The woman's lawyers argue that the death penalty is inappropriate for a crime committed at that age by a teenager suffering from an untreated mental illness, following a childhood marked by brutal sexual abuse and neglect. Pike was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Her lawyers have requested that, if she is executed, the lethal injection team be composed entirely of women: Christa fears that being immobilized on a stretcher and touched by male guards could cause her to relive the trauma she suffered as a child.