Why Tennessee Is About to Execute a Woman After 200 Years

The Long Silence Ends

Tennessee is about to do something its courts haven’t attempted in two centuries. On Wednesday, the state will execute Christa Pike, making her the first woman put to death in Tennessee since 1820. Governor Bill Lee denied her clemency request on Monday, closing the door on what civil rights groups called a necessary reckoning with how the state treats young women convicted of violent crimes.

Pike was 18 when she and a 17-year-old boyfriend killed 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a classmate at Knoxville Job Corps, in 1995. A satanic symbol was carved into the victim’s body. The case became a national story — part brutal murder, part moral panic, part coming-of-age tragedy. Three decades later, the cultural frame around that story has shifted dramatically, even as the outcome has not.

The Old Defense No Longer Fits

When Pike was tried in 1996, the satanic imagery in the killing dominated public attention and, likely, jury deliberations. The so-called Satanic Panic — a moral hysteria that peaked in the late 1980s and early 1990s — had already begun to fade from mainstream discourse, but its fingerprints were still visible in courtroom narratives across the country. Prosecutors leaned into the ritualistic element. The defense had to contend with a jury that saw a teenage girl playing occult roles, not a traumatized child acting out.

What emerged in the decades since painted a very different picture of the girl who committed that crime. Pike suffered severe childhood sexual abuse — starting as a toddler, including rape at ages 11 and 17, according to her federal public defender Stephen Ferrell. She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. Her attorneys argue that her original defense team failed to present this history to the jury, denying the court and the public a complete understanding of what drove an 18-year-old to violence.

This is the central tension in Pike’s case: the legal system of 1995 judged a teenager by the standards of its moment. The legal culture of 2026 judges her by standards that did not exist thirty years ago.

The Science That Arrived Too Late

The most consequential change has been scientific. Research into adolescent brain development, which matured rapidly in the 2000s and 2010s, has reshaped how courts treat teenage defendants. In 2005, the Supreme Court ruled in Roper v. Simmons that executing juveniles violated the Eighth Amendment. States have increasingly raised the age of criminal responsibility or modified sentencing guidelines for young offenders.

Pike’s co-defendant, Tadaryl Shipp, was 17 at the time of the murder. He received life with the possibility of parole. He was denied parole last year. A third teen who admitted being an accessory received probation. Pike received death. The disparity between their sentences has become a focal point for her legal team and for critics of capital punishment more broadly.

Ferrell argues that Pike’s death sentence is an outlier — a product of a legal era that neither understood adolescent trauma nor had access to the neuroscience that now explains it. Her attorneys have asked the Supreme Court to stay the execution, citing these developments.

The Female Execution Recalculation

Pike’s case does not exist in a vacuum. The United States has executed four women since 2020 — a remarkable acceleration for a country that executed zero women between 2005 and 2015. Missouri executed Amber McLaughlin, a transgender woman, in 2023. The federal government executed Lisa Montgomery in 2021, the first federal female execution in nearly seven decades. Georgia executed a woman in 2015.

This pattern raises an uncomfortable question for the anti-death-penalty movement: the coalition that has successfully argued for fewer executions overall has also, inadvertently, made female executions more visible. As male death row populations shrink and sentences get commuted or overturned, women on death row become proportionally more noticeable — and more vulnerable to political decisions that might overlook the gendered dimensions of their cases.

Pike was the youngest woman sentenced to death in modern US history at the time of her conviction. Her gender, her age at the crime, and her trauma history create a case that sits at the intersection of several reform movements — juvenile sentencing reform, trauma-informed justice, and opposition to capital punishment. The convergence is what makes her execution historically significant beyond Tennessee’s borders.

Who Wins and Who Loses

Governor Lee wins politically by upholding the sentence. He faces no electoral risk in a state that has executed more people than any other in the modern era. Tennessee has put 100+ inmates to death since 1976 — a number that reflects a legal culture that prioritizes finality over second looks.

Pike loses. She is 50 years old. She has spent nearly her entire adulthood on death row. She has, by her own account, come to understand the full gravity of her actions and has dedicated herself to helping other incarcerated women. Her attorneys describe her as remorseful and actively involved in rehabilitation programs. The state describes her as someone worthy of death.

The anti-death-penalty movement loses credibility with this execution. Every female execution in a state that hasn’t killed a woman in centuries becomes a rallying point — and a reminder that legal arguments about developmental science and trauma do not always translate into clemency. The coalition against capital punishment has made real gains, but those gains are uneven across demographics and geography.

What Happens Next

If the Supreme Court denies the stay, Pike will be the first woman executed in Tennessee in 200 years. If it grants one, the legal battle continues — likely through multiple rounds of federal appeals that could stretch for months or years.

Either way, the case will force a conversation that Tennessee has avoided for two centuries: whether the state’s approach to capital punishment accounts for the full humanity of the women it sends to death row. The Satanic Panic that framed Pike’s original trial is gone. The neuroscience that undermines her sentence is established. What remains is a governor who says he has given the matter deliberate consideration and found it wanting.

The question is no longer whether Pike understood what she did. The question is whether a state that executed a woman last in 1820 has anything left to learn from the intervening 206 years.