Botched Tennessee execution: what happened to Pike's two accomplices

Christa Pike survived a failed lethal injection in Tennessee. Her two teenage accomplices received far lighter sentences — one remains eligible for parole.

Pike's co-conspirators: where Tadaryl Shipp and Shadolla Peterson are now

Christa Pike, 50, remained in hospital early Thursday after a botched execution at a Tennessee prison, NBC News reports. She had been injected twice with a lethal drug but did not die, and was subsequently transferred to an off-site medical facility. Attorneys for Pike said late Wednesday that she was receiving hospital treatment, though her precise condition was not known to them.

Pike had been set to become the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years, according to historical records. She was the only woman on the state's death row.

The 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer

In 1995, Knoxville police said Pike and two teenage accomplices worked together to torture, slash and fatally beat Colleen Slemmer, 19. According to police, the group lured Slemmer — a classmate in their shared Job Corps training programme — to an abandoned steam plant near the University of Tennessee campus before attacking her.

The case drew widespread attention when investigators linked it to the occult: someone had carved a pentagram into Slemmer's chest, and Pike reportedly boasted to another student that she had kept a fragment of the victim's skull as a souvenir.

Pike has not disputed her role in the killing. She told police at the time that she "wasn't even thinking" when she assaulted Slemmer, adding that she had been jealous — believing the victim was attempting to steal the attention of her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp.

Shipp sentenced to life; eligible for parole

Shipp, who was 17 at the time of the murder, was sentenced to life in prison rather than death, on account of his age as a juvenile. He remains eligible for parole. At a post-conviction hearing, Shipp testified that it was he who carved the pentagram into Slemmer's chest.

Pike's lawyers have pointed to the disparity in outcomes as evidence that her age — she was 18 at the time — should have carried greater weight in sentencing. Scientific understanding of adolescent brain development has advanced considerably since 1995, they argue, and such research would today be considered a more significant mitigating factor.

Peterson received probation in exchange for cooperation

The third accomplice, Shadolla Peterson, was 18 at the time and served as a lookout during the attack. She was sentenced to probation in exchange for her cooperation with prosecutors.

Pike's lawyers have also noted that, at the time, prosecutors offered Pike herself a deal — a life sentence without parole in return for a guilty plea — which her legal representatives did not accept. Pike sobbed when the judge sentenced her to death by electrocution, then Tennessee's sole method of execution, and pleaded through tears: "Can I please hug my mom?"

Abuse history not presented to the jury

Central to Pike's clemency bid was the argument that the jury which sentenced her to death never heard evidence of her troubled upbringing. According to nbcnews.com, her childhood was marked by years of sexual and physical abuse and neglect.

Psychologist Bethany Brand, who specialises in trauma, assessed Pike three years ago at her Nashville prison. Brand reviewed police reports, past medical examinations and other case files. She found that Pike's parents were not stable figures in her life, and that her mother's boyfriends and other men had subjected her to abuse from a young age. Pike moved between family members in West Virginia and North Carolina, performing poorly at school. A year before the murder, at age 17, she reported to North Carolina police that she had been thrown to the ground and raped by a stranger on her way to a shop. No arrest was ever made.

Brand concluded in her final report that the adults in Pike's life had failed her. A bipolar disorder was only diagnosed several years after she had already entered prison.

Legal challenges dismissed

Pike's lawyers petitioned the Supreme Court to halt the execution, arguing she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from abuse that began when she was a toddler. Being restrained on a gurney, they wrote, was likely to inflict "severe mental suffering and superadded psychological terror" under the state's lethal injection protocol.

The state did not deny that Pike had experienced abuse, but the attorney general's office argued in a filing on Monday that a judge had already concluded last month that it was "speculative whether Pike would suffer" greater psychological harm from the specific protocol used. The Supreme Court denied her petition on Tuesday evening.

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee had earlier confirmed he was upholding her death sentence "after deliberate consideration." Another woman, Gaile Owens, was also on Tennessee's death row until 2010, when Governor Phil Bredesen commuted her sentence to life in prison.

Pike on her own culpability

In a letter to NBC News, shared by her spiritual adviser and written before she learned the governor would not intervene, Pike acknowledged that the public had seen only a "limited public persona that has been the only narrative" about her.

Her lawyer, Randall Spivey, addressed this directly: "Stepping into the chaos of Christa's life that led her to that moment will not justify her actions that night. But the chaos will show you that Christa was broken, not evil."

Pike herself reflected on the long process of coming to terms with what she had done. "It took me numerous years to even realise the gravity of what I'd done," she said in her clemency petition.

She entered prison and was placed in solitary confinement for up to 23 hours a day, and was prescribed Prozac to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder. Doctors only identified bipolar disorder some years into her incarceration.

Source: The Sun