If Christa Gail Pike’s execution proceeds as planned next year, she will become the first woman put to death in Tennessee since the state began to formally document capital punishment more than a century ago. After attempted appeals by Pike’s attorneys repeatedly failed, the Tennessee Supreme Court on Tuesday set a date for her to be executed.
The order granted a scheduling request from the state for the death warrant to be carried out Sept. 30, 2026, at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, which houses a majority of Tennessee’s death row inmates. Under the terms of this week’s state Supreme Court order, the prison warden is obligated to notify Pike of the method that the Department of Correction will use to execute her by Aug. 28.
Condemned inmates in Tennessee usually die by lethal injection, the state’s default execution method. But electrocution, while outdated, is technically also authorized as an alternative that inmates can “choose” as long as they committed a capital crime before Jan. 1, 1999. As reports increased of botched executions using lethal drugs in Tennessee and elsewhere around the United States, the Tennessee Correction Department said five inmates between 2018 and 2019 selected electrocution as their preferred execution method.
Pike’s death sentence
Now 49, Pike was convicted in the horrific 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer. Both were students at a career training program for troubled teenagers in Knoxville when Slemmer was tortured and brutally killed, according to court documents. Prosecutors argued in their case against Pike, then 18, that she had believed Slemmer, then 19, had wanted to steal Pike’s boyfriend…