A four-day hearing for Christa Pike, scheduled to become the first woman executed in Tennessee since 1819, starts Aug. 11. in Knoxville Criminal Court.
The Tennessean will be in the courtroom.
Christa Pike will not. She will remain inside the Deborah K. Johnson Rehabilitation, where she has been awaiting her death sentence. Her every move will be filmed and shown on a big screen inside the courtroom.
Pike, set for a Sept. 30 execution, has been in custody since 1995 when she was convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder in 1996 for the 1995 torture and killing of Colleen Slemmer, 19. Pike was 18 at the time.
Pike's attorneys will issue a number of challenges to the constitutionality of her execution. They will argue that:
- Pike's execution is inherently cruel because it will be carried out in a men's prison by an all-male execution team. Pike suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder after childhood abuse at the hands of men, her attorneys will argue.
- She suffers from thrombocytosis, which will render an injection as particularly cruel.
- Her veins are too small for an intravenous insertion of the lethal drugs.
- Attorneys will further argue that the state needs to permit a Buddhist advisor to be present with Pike during the execution.
Pike is the first death row inmate to be successful in a motion for a special master.
“We are pleased that the Tennessee Supreme Court recognizes and is taking seriously the problems we have identified with Tennessee’s lethal injection protocol as it applies to Christa’s specific mental and medical needs,” said her attorney, Luke Ihnen. “Christa suffered unimaginable sexual violence and abuse by adult male authority figures throughout her childhood. Housing her, even temporarily, in an all-male facility under 24-hour surveillance by male officers, and assigning all-male teams to extract her from her cell and strap her to the execution table, is inherently cruel and torturous given her history.”
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Christa Pike hearing starts Aug. 11
