Christa Pike’s legal team and multiple outside groups want Tennessee’s governor to halt her scheduled execution.
Christa Pike has spent more than three decades on death row after being convicted for the 1995 murder of her classmate Colleen Slemmer.
Pike, along with her then-boyfriend and a third friend, lured Slemmer into the woods where they beat and stabbed her to death.
Pike was 18 at the time, and her conviction made her the youngest woman in US history to receive a death sentence.
She’s now set to become the first woman executed by the state of Tennessee in over 200 years. Her execution is scheduled for September 30.
Her legal team has filed for clemency with Governor Bill Lee and several outside groups have joined the effort to stop the execution from moving forward.
Pike’s childhood was full of chaos and abuse
Pike’s clemency petition lays out her childhood as one marked by repeated sexual violence, chaos and neglect.
She suffered repeated sexual assault by her grandmother’s boyfriend between the ages of two and five. According to her lawyers, she ‘drew a man with a huge penis and demonic face to explain what happened in her home’ as a child.
