Tennessee plans to execute Christa Pike on Wednesday for the 1995 torture killing of Colleen Slemmer, and nearly every headline has led with the same fact: she would be the first woman the state has put to death in more than 200 years.
That is the fact of record. It is also the least useful thing about the case.
The headline everyone ran: Tennessee has not executed a woman since 1820. Pike is the only woman on its death row, and only 18 women have been executed anywhere in the United States since 1976.
The fact that explains it: Pike was 18. Her boyfriend, who took part in the same killing, was 17, could not be sentenced to death, and is now eligible for parole. She is the third person this month scheduled to die for a crime committed before age 21, a kind of sentence American juries have nearly stopped handing out.
Gender is why this execution is rare. Age is why it is happening at all, and it is the part the milestone coverage keeps skipping.
One Crime, Three Sentences
The crime is not in dispute, and it should be stated plainly.
In January 1995, Pike, her boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp and a friend, Shadolla Peterson, lured 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer to an abandoned steam plant near the Knoxville Job Corps campus where all four were students.
Prosecutors said Pike saw Slemmer as a romantic rival. Slemmer was tortured and beaten to death, and a pentagram was carved into her chest.
The Associated Press account published this week quotes Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, saying her daughter “was easygoing” and “trusted everybody.” Martinez plans to attend the execution carrying her daughter’s photograph.
Nothing in what follows is an argument that the crime was anything less than monstrous.
It is an argument about how the state sorted the people who committed it.
Shipp was 17. The Supreme Court’s 2005 decision in Roper v. Simmons barred executing anyone for a crime committed under 18, so he received life with the possibility of parole. NBC News reported this week that he is now parole-eligible.
Peterson was 18, served as a lookout, testified against the other two and received probation.
Pike was 18 as well, a few months past the birthday that separated her from Shipp. She received death.
Cornell Law School’s Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide, which has advocated for Pike’s clemency, notes that Shipp became parole-eligible a week after Tennessee issued her execution warrant last fall, even though courts had described him as equally or more culpable.
The Roper majority said something about that line at the time. It acknowledged that the qualities that make juveniles less culpable “do not disappear when an individual turns 18.” It drew the line anyway, because law needs a line.
Pike is the person standing just on the wrong side of it.
The Sentence the Country Stopped Giving
Here is the part the milestone coverage misses.
The Death Penalty Information Center counted this month that new death sentences for people aged 18 to 20 at the time of their crimes have “virtually vanished.” Since 2020 there has been about one a year nationwide, imposed by just five counties, 0.2% of all counties in the country.
September’s execution calendar looks nothing like that.
LeJames Norman was executed in Texas on September 16 for a 2005 triple murder he committed at 19.
His co-defendant, Ker’Sean Ramey, was executed a week later, on September 23, for the same crime, committed at 20.
Pike, 18 at the time of her crime, is next.
So three people in one month are being executed under a standard that the country’s juries, presented with young defendants today, almost never apply.
That is the mechanism the gender framing hides. The death rows of 2026 were filled by the sentencing habits of 1995 and 2005. Nothing about the modern consensus reaches back to them unless a governor chooses to let it.
The science moved in the same direction. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled in 2024 that people aged 18 to 20 cannot be sentenced to life without parole, citing research on impulse control, susceptibility to peer pressure and capacity for change in what it called emerging adults. Massachusetts has no death penalty, but under that ruling an 18-year-old there could not even be sentenced to die in prison.
Sixth Circuit Judge Jane Branstetter Stranch made the same point about Pike specifically in 2019, writing that a death sentence rules out the possibility that the crime was a product of youthful immaturity.
What Governor Lee Chose
Gov. Bill Lee had the power to close that gap for one person and declined.
“After deliberate consideration of Christa Gail Pike’s request for clemency, and after a thorough review of the case, I am upholding the sentence of the State of Tennessee and do not plan to intervene,” he said Monday, as WVLT reported.
The Tennessee Supreme Court had already refused a stay. Pike’s lawyers argued that her thrombocytosis, a blood disorder, could complicate the lethal injection, and that being strapped to a gurney risked severe psychological harm for a woman sexually abused as a child. The Nashville Banner reported that the U.S. Supreme Court is now her last route to a reprieve.
We think Lee got this wrong, and it is worth being precise about why.
It is not because Pike is a woman. A rule that spared women for being women would be its own injustice.
It is not because the crime was anything short of horrific, or because Pike has been a model prisoner. She has not. She was convicted in 2004 of attempting to strangle another inmate in 2001, and a former guard was charged in 2012 over a foiled plot to help her escape. Those facts belong in any honest account.
It is because clemency exists for exactly this situation: a sentence that was lawful when imposed and that the society imposing it would no longer choose. Juries have nearly stopped sending 18-year-olds to death. A state court in Massachusetts has said the reasoning behind Roper reaches past the 18th birthday. The man who participated in the same killing at 17 can walk out on parole.
A governor who commuted Pike’s sentence to life without parole would not have freed anyone. He would have brought one outlier sentence in line with how the country now treats young offenders. Lee had that option and chose the calendar instead.
Pike, for her part, wrote to NBC News that she is “at peace” and “not afraid to die,” only “nervous about the process.”
Questions Readers Are Asking
When is the execution scheduled?
Wednesday, September 30, 2026, by lethal injection at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. Pike was expected to be moved there from the women’s prison on Tuesday.
Can anything still stop it?
Only the U.S. Supreme Court. The Tennessee Supreme Court denied a stay and Gov. Bill Lee declined clemency on Monday, so her lawyers’ remaining appeal is to the justices in Washington.
Why did her co-defendant get parole eligibility?
Tadaryl Shipp was 17 at the time of the killing. Under Roper v. Simmons (2005), nobody can be executed for a crime committed under 18, so he received life with the possibility of parole. Pike was 18, which kept her death sentence lawful.
How rare are executions of women?
Very. Only 18 women have been executed in the U.S. since 1976, roughly 1% of all executions, and Pike would be the 19th. Tennessee last executed a woman in 1820.
Whatever the justices decide, the question this case leaves behind is not about 1820. It is about how many more people are sitting on death rows for crimes committed at 18, 19 and 20, sentenced under a consensus that no longer exists, waiting to find out whether their governor will notice.