Woman set to be first female inmate executed in Tennessee in over 200 years as state responds to lawsuit
A woman in Tennessee will become the first woman to be executed in the state in more than 200 years.
Christa Pike is the only woman being held on death row in Tennessee in the US.
Her execution is currently set to take place on September 30 2026. and according to the Death Penalty Information Center this is will be more 30 years after her crime.
This was the killing of Colleen Slemmer, who was aged 19, when Pike herself was jut 18 years old.
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Back in January 2026 Pike filed a lawsuit in which she claimed that the execution method that would be used, which is the lethal injection, would break her constitutional and religious rights, according to reporting from USA Today.
The State of Tennessee responded to Pike's claim on March 19, and said that Pike, who is now 50 years old, had not demonstrated enough that the method of lethal injection would violate her constitutional rights and her religion.
Pike argued that she will not be able to communicate to her spiritual advisor in Buddhism before her execution, and this would go against her 'sincerely held religious belief of Buddhism'.
Challenging the method of execution also means that she has to select another method of execution, and she has claimed that this would also violate her religious beliefs as she should not 'participate[e] in any process leading to her own death'.
In December 2024, the way that lethal injection is administered in Tennessee has also changed.
It now includes just one drug, which is pentobarbital, instead of a combination of three drugs, and Pike's attorneys wrote that this also violates her constitutional rights due to her 'unique medical conditions'.
The lawyers claimed that the method is 'plagued with the same issues that have marked botched executions for decades: secrecy, intentional omission, inattention to detail, and untrained and unlicensed prison personnel attempting to fill a medical role.'
They added: “Because of these failures, the new protocol is sure or very likely to result in unnecessary and superadded pain and suffering, terror, and disgrace,” her attorneys also wrote in the filing, obtained by the Nashville Banner.
Pike was given the death penalty after being found guilty of murdering Colleen Slemmer in 1995.
The court heard that Pike had lured Slemmer into the woods in Knoxville, where she was beaten and stabbed and had a pentagram carved into her chest.
Pike also reportedly kept a fragment of Slemmer's skull, which she showed to her classmates.
Slemmer's body would be discovered by a groundskeeper who said that it 'was so badly beaten that he had first mistaken it for the corpse of an animal', according to reporting from CBS News.
Since her conviction, Pike has spent some 30 years on death row, being the only women on death row in Tennessee.
Kit Roberts