(The Center Square) – Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee said Monday he will not intervene in Wednesday’s execution of Christa Gail Pike.
Pike, now 50, was convicted of killing 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in Knoxville when Pike was just 18. Her attorneys asked the governor to stop the execution and give Pike life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Lethal injection to Pike is scheduled for 10 a.m. local time at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.
The Tennessee Supreme Court refused to stay Pike’s execution this week. She will be the first woman executed since the 1800s, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Lee has refused clemency petitions in two other executions this year. But the governor granted a one-year reprieve to Tony Carruthers, who survived an execution when the Tennessee Department of Corrections said doctors could not find a second IV line.
Pike’s attorneys and death penalty opponents raised concerns about Carruthers’ failed execution before Anthony Darrell Hines was executed on Aug. 13 for the 1985 murder of Catherine Jenkins, a motel maid in Kingston Springs.
“Although as a group we take no position on capital punishment, each of us was horrified by the torturous treatment of Mr. Carruthers,” the doctors said in a letter to Lee provided by the U.S. Campaign to End the Death Penalty. “If Tennessee is going to continue executing prisoners, it must find a way to do so that does not inflict severe pain and suffering on the person being executed and does not require the involvement of medical professionals contrary to their ethical obligations.”
In Pike’s case, they are also raising questions about her age and the abuse they say happened to her before Slemmer’s murder.
Besides Slemmer’s murder, Pike was convicted of the attempted murder of Patricia Jones, a fellow inmate, according to the Tennessee Department of Corrections.
