A Tennessee inmate is scheduled to become the first woman executed in the state in more than two centuries.
Christa Pike is currently the only woman on Tennessee’s death row.
Her execution is set for September 30, 2026. The Death Penalty Information Center notes that would place the execution more than 30 years after the crime.
The case dates back to the death of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, which occurred when Pike was 18.
In January 2026, Pike filed a lawsuit arguing that Tennessee’s planned execution method—lethal injection—would violate both her constitutional protections and her religious rights, according to USA Today.
On March 19, the State of Tennessee pushed back, saying that Pike, now 50, had not provided sufficient evidence that lethal injection would infringe her constitutional rights or her religion.
Pike’s filing also contends she would be unable to communicate with a Buddhist spiritual advisor prior to her execution, which she says conflicts with her ‘sincerely held religious belief of Buddhism’.
Because challenging the state’s lethal-injection protocol requires selecting an alternative method, Pike further argues that this, too, would be incompatible with her beliefs—claiming she should not ‘participate[e] in any process leading to her own death’.
Tennessee’s lethal-injection procedure was revised in December 2024.
The state now uses a single drug—pentobarbital—rather than a three-drug combination. Pike’s attorneys argue the updated approach still violates her constitutional rights because of her ‘unique medical conditions’.
In court filings, her legal team described the process as ‘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 received the death sentence after being convicted of murdering Slemmer in 1995.
Prosecutors said Pike lured Slemmer to a wooded area in Knoxville, where Slemmer was beaten and stabbed, and where a pentagram was carved into her chest.
Pike was also accused of keeping a fragment of Slemmer’s skull and later displaying it to classmates.
Slemmer’s body was later found 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 CBS News.
After her conviction, Pike has remained on death row for roughly three decades and is still Tennessee’s only female death-row inmate.