Attorneys for a death row inmate convinced the Tennessee Supreme Court to conduct an investigation into the state’s lethal injection program.
But it’s not because of the recent failed execution.
The state is scheduled to execute Christa Pike on Sept. 30. She would be the first woman put to death in the state in two centuries.
Defense attorneys note that Pike has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder because of an extensive history of sexual trauma, which started when she was a toddler.
They note that ahead of the execution, she would be transferred to the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution for two weeks. That’s a male prison, where the staff is predominantly male. Then, the execution team would forcibly extract her from her cell, hold her down and strap her to a gurney. The attorneys say this would re-traumatize her.
“Christa suffered unimaginable sexual violence and abuse by adult male authority figures throughout her childhood,” one of her attorneys, Luke Ihnen, said in a press release. “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.”
The court agreed to appoint a special master to investigate whether this would be a violation of Pike’s rights.
The special master will also consider whether she’s at risk of undergoing a cruel and unusual punishment because of her diagnosis with a blood disorder. The condition, thrombocytosis, means she has too high of a blood platelet count. It increases the risk of blood clotting, which can cause heart attacks and strokes. Pike’s attorneys argue this condition and her compromised veins could make delivering a lethal injection particularly difficult.
The court named Senior Judge Mark Ward as special master and a multi-day hearing is scheduled for to begin Aug. 11.
Pike’s conviction
Pike was convicted of first-degree murder in 1996. When she was 18 she was a Job Corps student. So was her boyfriend, then-17-year-old Tadaryl Shipp. Together, they murdered a classmate, Colleen Slemmer. Another participant kept watch and later became an informant. Shipp was sentenced to life without parole.
Pike spent 30 years in solitary confinement in a cell the size of a parking space, the Nashville Banner reported in 2024.
Pike has several other health conditions. She had developmental complications because of her mother’s alcohol use while pregnant, according to an article by Cornell Law School’s Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide. After she was imprisoned, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
Pike’s execution date is the third scheduled for this year. TDOC attempted to put to death Tony Carruthers in May. That failure has spurred several legal battles, but Gov. Bill Lee has maintained TDOC did nothing wrong, and there is no need for an independent investigation.
Darrell Hines is set to undergo the lethal injection on August 13.
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