Shortly before Christa Pike was supposed to be put to death Wednesday morning, a federal appeals court granted her a temporary stay of execution. On Wednesday evening, a divided Supreme Court lifted it.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor and her two liberal colleagues criticized the high court’s intervention, saying it would allow “the State to execute Pike before litigation over her conviction has properly run its course in the lower courts.”
For a few hours, it had seemed possible that Pike might attain a less gruesome outcome than the one she had been slated for since 1996, when she was convicted of brutally murdering a classmate. The Supreme Court’s action means there will be no happy ending to Pike’s story. Still, it’s worth studying her case and the problems with how it has been handled to understand flaws in our legal system and its uneven application of capital punishment.
All too often, it is easier to stand up for someone whose guilt is in doubt or whose conviction was tainted by prejudice than for someone like Pike.
Many death-row cases that experience a last-minute intervention involve doubts about the guilt of the defendant or their mental fitness. Neither of these issues applies to Pike.
When she was 18, Pike joined the Knoxville, Tennessee, branch of a federal job training program. She started dating a 17-year-old named Tadary Shipp. At some point, Pike began to suspect that another person in the program, 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, was interested in Shipp. According to The Tennessean, in January 1995, “Pike lured Slemmer to a wooded area near the University of Tennessee’s Agricultural Campus with the promise of marijuana. With the help of Shipp, Pike tortured Slemmer before beating her to death with a chunk of asphalt. A pentagram was also carved into her body.”
Slemmer’s body was discovered the next day. A third person was arrested but was later given probation in exchange for testifying against Pike and Shipp.
From the start, there was little doubt about Pike’s guilt. The critical question was what punishment she would receive. Pike was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. Shipp was convicted on the same charge but, being 17, was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole.
The fate of defendants in the death penalty process is routinely decided based on not just what they have done but also on who represents them and how successfully they navigate the intricacies of the legal process. Pike is one of just eight teenagers sentenced to death in Tennessee in the past 50 years — and the only one whose sentence has not been vacated.
In Pike’s case, the jury was not given a full picture of her life experiences and how they might have contributed to her horrible crime. Neither of her lawyers had ever tried a death penalty case, and they devoted only an hour to trying to convince the jury that Pike’s life was worth sparing.
That petition asked Gov. Bill Lee to spare her life and noted that Pike has “Bipolar Disorder and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which resulted from her horrific childhood and rapes.” The document continues: “Unmedicated and untreated, Christa’s PTSD, Bipolar Disorder, and brain damage played a major role in Christa’s crime. She was not able to ‘put the brakes on’” to stop herself from behaving violently, it argued.
Among the facts not mentioned at trial was that during her childhood, Pike was the victim of repeated sexual assaults. As a clemency petition filed Sept. 2 noted, Pike was “raped as a toddler … as an 11-year-old child” and again “at age 17, almost a year to the day before her crime.”
For a few hours, it had seemed possible that Pike might attain a less gruesome outcome than the one she had been slated for since 1996.
Well-trained death penalty lawyers and mitigation specialists can achieve great success, but Pike did not have skilled representation.
What’s more, as Justice Sotomayor noted, for years the state told courts that Pike was a pathological liar and that her reported history as a survivor of sexual abuse was fabricated. Only recently did it concede that Pike was telling the truth about her experience of abuse.
Sadly, this chain of events involving the state’s false claims is not itself enough to invalidate Pike’s conviction. The Sixth Circuit granted the stay so it could consider a narrower and more technical point — namely, whether Pike’s contention that the state’s concession should be considered constitutes a new “claim,” something that cannot be presented at this stage. But even that narrowing of the issue did not stop the Supreme Court’s pro-death-penalty majority from intervening.
More than 30 years have passed since Pike committed her gruesome crime. As Pike put it in her petition for clemency: “I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid. It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I’d done. Even more to accept how many lives I have affected. I took the life of someone’s child, sister, friend. It sickens me now to think I had the ability to commit such a crime.”
Pike’s petition also argued that “[w]hile incarcerated, Christa worked to heal the impact of childhood abuse and neglect.” “After years of psychotherapy and medications to treat her mental illness,” it added, “Christa is thoughtful, even-tempered, bright, funny, and hopeful.”
The legal term for the leniency Pike initially needed is mitigation — whether a jury could be convinced that factors in her life might mitigate her punishment. Mitigation doesn’t mean that a defendant is not responsible for a crime. Instead, psychologists explain, it refers to “any feature of a defendant’s character or history, or characteristics of the offense, that may convince the factfinder to impose a sentence less than death.”
All too often, it is easier to stand up for someone whose guilt is in doubt or whose conviction was tainted by prejudice than for someone like Pike, whose guilt is not in question. Her experience is a reminder that the lives of capital defendants are often shaped by brutality and violence, and that our society is often stingy when it comes to extending mercy to those who were victims of violence long before they committed violent crimes.
Yet standing up for Pike, and people who commit grievous acts, is what mercy requires.
The post Christa Pike’s guilt was never in doubt. Her death sentence should have been. appeared first on MS NOW.
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