The first woman sentenced to death in the state of Tennessee in 200 years is demanding a lethal injection team of all women to carry out her execution, saying she could be traumatized by having men involved in her final moments.
Lawyers for Christa Pike, now 50 years old, have said men factor into the potential execution trauma because she has a post-traumatic stress disorder from the documented abuse she suffered at the hands of males as a young girl, the New York Post reported Tuesday.
“Christa was broken, not evil,” her attorneys wrote in the petition.
Pike was just 18 when she was convicted of luring fellow Job Corps student Colleen Slemmer, 19, to an isolated spot on the University of Tennessee campus in Knoxville in 1995 and torturing her to death with the help of her boyfriend, according to news reports and court documents.
At the time she claimed Slemmer had been trying to hook up with her boyfriend and was “running her mouth” everywhere.
Pike then lured Slemmer to take a trip with her to a Blockbuster video store but instead she and her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, beat the girl, slashed her throat, and engraved Satanic symbols on her body, according to reports of the court proceedings.
She reportedly celebrated the killing the next day.
Boyfriend Shipp was sentenced to life for the crime because he was only 17 at the time of the murder.
Pike is scheduled to be executed on September 30. Her lawyers say she wants women involved because she suffered sexual abuse when she was as young as two years old as well as several other sexual assaults by various males as she grew up.
“If this request isn’t possible, then Pike will ask to be hanged instead,” the New York Post reported.
The victim’s mother, May Martinez, called the death row inmate’s request nonsense.
“I don’t think she should be allowed to have any special treatment,” she told the Daily Mail, adding that “she didn’t consider how my daughter felt — she’s just playing the system … It’s all bullcrap.”
Despite the last-ditch effort to have her execution of choice, her legal team is also asking Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee (R) to grant her clemency and commute her sentence to life without parole, according to the newspaper.
No evidence of past sexual abuse was presented to the jury, according to the Mail.
Pike was convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder and sentenced to death on March 30, 1996, making her one of the youngest women sentenced to death in the U.S.
Breitbart News contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the best-selling author of Forever and Five Days, the true story of a nursing aide and a diabolical female psychopath charged with the murder of patients in a Michigan nursing home. He has also authored nine other true crime books and novels. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.
