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Tennessee Ignored The Abused Girl. Now It Wants To Execute The Woman She Became.
Description
Tennessee is about to execute an abuse survivor it spent her whole life failing, and Governor Bill Lee says it’s happening next Wednesday.
Quick note: the apps bury videos that use the real word for what was done to her, so I’m saying “assaulted.” You know what I mean. The algorithm is more upset about the word than anyone who could have stopped it ever was about the act.
Her name is Christa Pike. She’d be the first woman Tennessee has executed since 1819, back when the state’s mental health system was a jar of leeches.
I’ll be straight with you. At 18, Christa took part in killing another teenager, Colleen Slemmer, and nothing I say makes that okay. Colleen’s family has carried that for three decades. I want to talk about what happened to Christa before that night, and what Tennessee has done to her since.
She was abused from the time she was a toddler. In elementary school a teacher saw the signs, called her parents, and nobody investigated. At 11, a neighbor assaulted her and pleaded no contest to taking “indecent liberties” with a child. Liberties. At 17, it happened again. Her bipolar disorder and PTSD weren’t diagnosed until after she was locked up, and UN experts say her jury never properly heard any of it.
Then Tennessee had a filing problem: one woman on death row and nowhere to put her. So they put her alone in a cell 22 to 23 hours a day for roughly 28 years. UN experts, including their torture investigator, call that torture. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights found the men on death row got better conditions. Her boyfriend, convicted of the same murder, got life with parole. Seven men Tennessee sentenced to death for crimes they committed at 18 have all had those sentences thrown out. Christa’s the last one.
The Vera Institute found 86 percent of women in jail have survived sexual violence. The abuse doesn’t end at the arrest. The state just takes over the shift.
This is a state that calls itself pro-life. Tennessee Republicans voted down a rape exception for pregnant minors. So they’ll force an 11-year-old to give birth, and if she grows up broken and does something terrible, they’ll kill her. From conception to lethal injection, Tennessee has a plan for every stage of a girl’s life except the one where somebody helps her.
That’s why the people begging Governor Lee aren’t just death penalty activists. It’s more than a hundred groups that fight violence against women, plus the UN’s investigator on violence against women and girls. They see every girl this system is failing right now.
And Governor Lee’s execution process? In May his team spent over an hour failing to get a backup IV into a man, and the doctor hadn’t placed a central line since 2013. Lee said the process “still stands as it should.” That’s the process he’s about to use on a woman who trauma experts say could relive her abuse strapped to that table.
Her clemency petition asks for life without parole, not freedom. Tennessee failed her every time it could have saved her. It has six days to decide whether to do it one last time.
Contact Gov. Lee: https://www.tn.gov/governor/contact-us.html
Sources
https://truthout.org/articles/tennessee-is-days-away-from-executing-a-sexual-assault-victim/