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Tennessee Governor Bill Lee announced on September 28 that he would not grant clemency to Christa Gail Pike after reviewing her petition to commute the death sentence to life without parole. Lee stated that after deliberate consideration of the request and a thorough review of the case he is upholding the sentence of the State of Tennessee and does not plan to intervene. Pike who is now 50 is scheduled for execution by lethal injection the following day marking what would be the first execution of a woman in the state in more than 200 years according to multiple local news reports. Her legal team filed the clemency petition earlier in September arguing that the decision places Tennessee in a unique position as the first state to execute someone who was a teenager at the time of the offense in the modern death penalty era.
Pike was convicted in 1996 for her role in the 1995 torture and murder of Colleen Slemmer a 19-year-old she met at a job training program for troubled youth on the University of Tennessee agriculture campus in Knoxville according to accounts from WVLT and other Tennessee outlets. Court records show that Pike and her then-boyfriend beat and tortured Slemmer before killing her with a meat cleaver and a large rock while carving a pentagram into her chest. The crime occurred when Pike was 18 years old and her attorneys have highlighted this age as a key factor in appeals noting that science recognizes an 18-year-old brain is not fully developed like an adult brain.
Pike’s attorneys Stephen Ferrell Kelly Gleason and Randy Spivey expressed deep sadness over the governor’s decision in a statement released after the announcement. The lawyers said the ruling leaves unanswered vital questions about Tennessee’s execution protocol and ignores what both science and the legal system have decided about the maturity of an 18-year-old. They added that they will continue supporting Pike through every remaining avenue and advocate for a system that is transparent for the people of Tennessee while planning to seek further relief from the United States Supreme Court.
The Tennessee Supreme Court denied Pike’s request to halt the execution earlier this month and her team has challenged the state’s lethal injection method claiming it could cause unconstitutional pain and suffering according to reports from FOX17 and WATE. Pike has asked for an all-female execution team as part of preparations for the procedure set to take place at a Nashville facility. Similar clemency denials by Governor Lee in recent years for other inmates such as Harold Wayne Nichols in 2025 and Nicholas Todd Sutton have followed the same phrasing in official statements underscoring a pattern in how the governor has handled such requests.
Data from the Death Penalty Information Center places the number of women executed in the United States since the 1970s at only 18 compared with 1,663 men reflecting the rarity of capital punishment for female offenders. The center’s figures show that women currently represent about 2 percent of all individuals on death row nationwide with fewer than 50 such cases as of late 2025. In Tennessee Pike has been the lone woman on death row for years and her case has drawn attention to broader questions about trauma history and juvenile brain development in capital sentencing.
Governor Lee’s decision aligns with his approach in prior clemency reviews where he has rarely intervened despite petitions citing rehabilitation or mitigating circumstances in other death row cases. The execution if carried out would follow a series of legal challenges that have tested the state’s revised lethal injection protocol after earlier pauses ordered by Lee in 2022 due to concerns over the process. Pike’s clemency filing included extensive documentation of her background including claims of childhood abuse that her attorneys say were not fully presented at the original trial.
