U.S. | Tennessee set to execute only woman on state's death row

If Christa Gail Pike's execution proceeds as planned next year, she will become the first woman put to death in Tennessee since the state began to formally document capital punishment more than a century ago. After attempted appeals by Pike's attorneys repeatedly failed, the Tennessee Supreme Court on Tuesday set a date for her to be executed.

The order granted a scheduling request from the state for the death warrant to be carried out Sept. 30, 2026, at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, which houses a majority of Tennessee's death row inmates. Under the terms of this week's state Supreme Court order, the prison warden is obligated to notify Pike of the method that the Department of Correction will use to execute her by Aug. 28. 

Condemned inmates in Tennessee usually die by lethal injection, the state's default execution method. But electrocution, while outdated, is technically also authorized as an alternative that inmates can "choose" as long as they committed a capital crime before Jan. 1, 1999. As reports increased of botched executions using lethal drugs in Tennessee and elsewhere around the United States, the Tennessee Correction Department said five inmates between 2018 and 2019 selected electrocution as their preferred execution method.

Pike's death sentence

Now 49, Pike was convicted in the horrific 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer. Both were students at a career training program for troubled teenagers in Knoxville when Slemmer was tortured and brutally killed, according to court documents. Prosecutors argued in their case against Pike, then 18, that she had believed Slemmer, then 19, had wanted to steal Pike's boyfriend.

The boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, and Pike's friend Shadolla Peterson helped her carry out the murder, according to court records, which say Pike cut Slemmer with a box cutter and carved a pentagram onto her chest over the course of 30 minutes or an hour, in a wooded part of the University of Tennessee's campus. The slain teenager's body was discovered by a groundskeeper who "testified that the body was so badly beaten that he had first mistaken it for the corpse of an animal," the court records say.

Shipp, who was 17 at the time of Slemmer's murder and not eligible for the death penalty, received a lifetime prison sentence and will be up for parole in November. Peterson testified against Pike during the trial and received probation.

Pike was the youngest person on death row when she received her sentence in 1996, at 20. She has also been the only woman on Tennessee's death row for most of her three decades behind bars — circumstances that her attorneys likened to solitary confinement in a lawsuit that argued the punishment was unconstitutional. The suit led to a settlement in September 2024 allowing Pike more opportunities for social interaction.

Fewer than 50 women on death row

The U.S. has executed 18 women since the modern application of death penalty began in 1976, with the most recent being Amber McLaughlin's lethal injection in Missouri in January 2023, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit organization that shares data on capital punishment but doesn't take a position on it. 

While the Tennessee Department of Correction says no definitive records exist of executions that took place in the state before 1900, a collection of widely cited independent research on capital punishment in early America shows that Tennessee hasn't put a woman to death since 1820.

Among roughly 2,100 inmates currently awaiting execution nationwide, just 48 are women, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, which published the results of an academic study that found most of them experienced gender-based violence prior to their convictions and that gender bias impacted nearly all of their cases. The organization says public perspectives appear to have changed in recent decades, as only three women have been sentenced to death anywhere in the U.S. since 2020. 

Appeals, clemency petition

In petitions seeking clemency or a commuted sentence, Pike's attorneys have consistently pointed to the unlikelihood of her receiving a death sentence for the same crime had she committed it as a teenager in the present day. Their filings cite her history of mental illnesses, including PTSD and bipolar disorder, congenital brain damage, childhood sexual abuse, abandonment and neglect, noting that evidence of those issues wasn't presented at Pike's trial. 

"Society's view of who is truly deserving of a death sentence has changed in the years since Christa Pike was sentenced," Robin Maher, the Death Penalty Information Center's executive director, told CBS News. "Her young age, mental illness, and the physical and mental abuse she suffered at the time of her crime would likely persuade a jury today she is not someone who should receive a death sentence."

Juries are currently sentencing fewer young people to death than they once did, according to the center, which says only three states that still practice the death penalty have imposed new death sentences on a person between 18 and 20 in the last five years.

Source: CBS News, Emily Mae Czachor, October 2, 2025

"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."

— Oscar Wilde