Two Hundred Years, One Woman, One Wednesday

There is a particular kind of waiting that happens on death row—a waiting measured not in days or months but in the slow accumulation of decades, in the quiet rituals of a life reduced to a cell and a schedule, in the knowledge that the state has set a date and the clock is no longer abstract.

Christa Pike, 50, is scheduled to be executed Wednesday by lethal injection in Tennessee. If the sentence is carried out, she will be the first woman executed in the state in more than 200 years . Her attorneys have filed a clemency petition with Governor Bill Lee, who announced Monday he would not intervene. A request to the U.S. Supreme Court to stay the execution remains pending .

Pike was 18 when she and her boyfriend tortured and killed 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a classmate at the Knoxville Job Corps, in January 1995. Prosecutors said Pike feared Slemmer was a romantic rival. Slemmer was lured to a secluded area, beaten with a piece of asphalt, cut with a box cutter, and a pentagram was carved into her chest. Pike was the only one of the three involved to receive a death sentence; her boyfriend, who was 17 at the time, was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole .

Pike does not deny her guilt. "I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid," she said in a statement included in her clemency petition. "It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I'd done. Even more to accept how many lives I affected. I took the life of someone's child, sister, friend. It sickens me now to think I had the ability to commit such a crime" .

Her attorneys argue that a death sentence is not appropriate for a crime committed at 18 by a teenager with untreated mental illness after a childhood of brutal sexual abuse and neglect. They say her trial lawyers did not present the jury with critical information about her past or argue that her age should be considered. Pike was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder .

Slemmer's mother, May Martinez, wants the execution to proceed. "She committed the crime," Martinez told the BBC. "I mean, she should pay for it" . The organization The Justice Coalition has raised money for Martinez to travel to the prison to witness the execution .

The case has drawn international attention. UN experts have urged Tennessee authorities to halt the execution and commute her sentence . Amnesty International has called on Governor Lee to grant clemency, noting that Pike "endured rape, sexual and physical violence, abuse, and neglect" as a child and that the state "failed to protect her" .

Tennessee has executed three inmates in the past year, and Pike's would be the state's second completed execution of 2026 . For now, Pike waits in isolation, part of the state's pre-execution protocol. "I run through this execution every day in my heart," she said in an audio recording shared by her lawyers. "Whatever happens on Sept. 30, this will not be my hell anymore" .

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Sources: The New York Times, The Associated Press, BBC News, Dagbladet, Amnesty International USA, OHCHR