With Christa Pike’s scheduled execution approaching on September 30, 2026, her attorneys are making a final appeal for clemency, pointing to her traumatic childhood and a photograph taken when she was a young girl. Pike, now 50, was sentenced to death in Tennessee for the 1995 killing of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer when Pike was 18. Her legal team has asked Governor Bill Lee to consider her history of childhood abuse, along with mental-health conditions they say were diagnosed years after her conviction. In a clemency petition, attorney Randall J. Spivey describes a childhood photograph of Pike with curly red hair and brown eyes, saying the image was taken around the period when the abuse allegedly began. The attorneys argue that the picture helps show the young person behind the adult who was later sentenced to death and provides important context for the governor’s clemency decision.

Pike’s case has remained before the courts and state officials for decades, with her legal team continuing to challenge the scheduled execution and seek a sentence of life imprisonment instead. Her attorneys say she has expressed deep remorse and changed significantly over the years, while prosecutors have emphasized the seriousness of the 1995 crime. If the execution goes forward as scheduled, it would make Pike the first woman executed by Tennessee since 1820, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. The case has therefore drawn renewed attention not only to the crime itself, but also to questions about childhood trauma, later diagnoses, rehabilitation and the role of clemency in capital cases. The photograph included with the petition has become one of the most personal elements of Pike’s final appeal, giving the governor a glimpse of her life long before she became a death-row inmate.