Pike doesn’t dispute her role in the grisly killing. But details about her upbringing, marked by years of sexual and physical abuse and neglect, were not shared with the jury that sentenced her to death. Her lawyers believe that if such evidence of abuse were presented at a trial now, a death sentence would not be guaranteed.
They have asked the Supreme Court to halt Pike’s execution, saying that she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from being molested and raped beginning when she was a toddler. Being held down and strapped to a gurney, they wrote, will likely create “severe mental suffering and superadded psychological terror under Tennessee’s lethal injection protocol.”
The state hasn’t denied that Pike has suffered from abuse. But in a response filed Monday, the attorney general’s office said a judge already concluded last month that it was “speculative whether Pike would suffer” greater mental harm from how the lethal injection protocol is carried out.
The Supreme Court is Pike’s remaining chance for a reprieve after Lee said he was upholding her death sentence “after deliberate consideration.”
Pike’s lawyers said Monday they were “saddened and heartbroken.”
Another woman, Gaile Owens, was on Tennessee’s death row with Pike until 2010, when Gov. Phil Bredesen changed her sentence to life in prison.
In her letter, Pike wrote that people have seen a “limited public persona that has been the only narrative” about her. Her lawyers had tried to convince Lee that she was a product of a tumultuous childhood.
“Stepping into the chaos of Christa’s life that led her to that moment will not justify her actions that night,” one of her lawyers, Randall Spivey, said of when she committed her crime. “But the chaos will show you that Christa was broken, not evil.”
Different sentences
Pike’s lawyers also point to her age and how it led to such a different outcome in her case.
While she faced a death sentence because of her first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder conviction in Slemmer’s death, another conspirator was spared: Pike’s boyfriend, who was 17 at the time. Tadaryl Shipp received a life sentence because he was a juvenile and remains eligible for parole. Shipp testified at his post-conviction hearing that he was the one who carved a pentagram into Slemmer’s chest.
The third accomplice — Shadolla Peterson, then 18 — served as a lookout in the crime and received probation in exchange for her cooperation.
Pike told police she “wasn’t even thinking” when she assaulted Slemmer and that she had been jealous believing the victim was trying to steal Shipp’s attention. Pike’s lawyers say that her age would have been more of a factor today, given how scientific research has evolved in understanding that young people’s brains are still developing well beyond their teen years.
In addition, her lawyers say that her legal representatives at the time could have accepted a deal from prosecutors who were offering a life sentence without parole in return for a guilty plea.
Pike sobbed as the judge told her she would die by electrocution, then the only form of execution in Tennessee before the state moved to lethal injection as its primary method.
She pleaded through tears: “Can I please hug my mom?”
Pike entered prison, where she was placed into solitary confinement for up to 23 hours a day and prescribed Prozac to treat her obsessive-compulsive disorder. Early on, she struggled to express remorse.
“It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I’d done,” Pike said in her clemency petition.
Lingering trauma
Three years ago, Bethany Brand, a psychologist specializing in trauma, was asked by Pike’s lawyers to assess whether she suffers from psychological disorders and consider if any contributed to the crime.
She sat with Pike at her Nashville prison and reviewed police reports, past medical examinations and other files in her case detailing physical and sexual abuse. Brand learned that Pike’s parents were not stable figures in her life. Her mother’s boyfriends and other men had molested her from a young age, the files said. She did poorly in school, living with other family members in West Virginia and North Carolina. At 17 — one year before she would take part in Slemmer’s murder — Pike reported to North Carolina police that she was walking to the store when a man threw her to the ground and raped her. No one was ever arrested.
In her final report, Brand wrote that the adults in Pike’s life failed her. Doctors only diagnosed a bipolar disorder a few years after she was already in prison.
The level of trauma Pike was subjected to “is almost impossible to grasp because it is so severe,” Brand wrote.
She told NBC News that medications in prison have helped Pike tremendously and that she now has “empathy and great regret” for what she did. But, she added, Pike’s case is a lesson of the need for greater awareness surrounding women’s mental health and recognizing trauma and untreated mental illness.
“In Christa’s case, nobody was trying to get her help,” Brand said.
May Martinez is unconvinced that the person responsible for mutilating her daughter’s body and leaving her nude from the waist up could change.
Martinez recalled how, after the investigation ended, she did not realize all of her daughter’s body parts weren’t buried with her remains, as some had been retained as trial evidence. She had to pick up Slemmer’s skull from the courthouse, and remembers that the medical examiner’s office mailed her other parts later. (The office said it rarely retains human remains as it had 30 years ago because of better technology, enhanced photography and lab work.)
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