Tennessee has scheduled Christa Pike for execution on September 30, 2026. She was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer.

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A troubling pattern that seems to unite nearly everyone sentenced to death in this country is having survived horrific physical and sexual abuse growing up, being born with brain damage, suffering from several mental illnesses, and a complete failure of social safety nets that should have intervened to help Christa before she went on to harm somebody else. Christa Pike' story contains every single one of these elements.

Christa's case is a prime example of the absolutely arbitrary application of the death penalty that has haunted this system since its inception - Christa faces execution, meanwhile one co-defendant, aged 17 at the time, was given life with the possibility of parole(parole eligibility begins in 2030) and the third walked away with parole as a result of their cooperation with investigators.

Christa was barely 18 at the time of this crime. The current scientific consensus is that brain maturation is not reached until the mid-twenties and that there is little difference in the brain between a 17 and 18 year old. It should not come as a shock to anyone that those whose brain is not fully developed are impulsive and lack the reasoning of responsible of adults. The difficulty of this issue is that science is focused on moving forward, unraveling all of the interworkings of the natural world; meanwhile, the legal system is focused on precedent - the past. It is difficult to reconcile changing scientific consensus within a system that does everything it can to hang onto the past - and because of that a woman will lose her life(as hundreds of others already have).

Further information and action opportunities can be found at MercyForChrista.org.

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If Christa's execution is carried out, she would become the first woman executed in Tennessee in 200 years and the 19th woman executed in modern U.S. history.

We are concerned that while the vast majority of states with capital punishment continue on a downward trend of executions, Tennessee continues to go against trend by carrying on an aggressive execution schedule.