By Isabelle Wilson-
Christa Pike’s final appeal is no longer primarily a courtroom battle. It is a question for one man in Nashville: Governor Bill Lee.
On September 30, unless something changes, Tennessee plans to execute Pike for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. Pike was 18 when Slemmer was killed. She is now 50 and has spent almost three decades on death row. If the execution proceeds, Pike will become the first woman Tennessee has executed in more than 200 years.
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But before the state carries out the sentence, Pike’s lawyers have put the case directly before the governor. They have filed a 226-page clemency petition asking governor Lee to commute Pike’s death sentence to life imprisonment without parole. The petition does not ask the governor to declare her innocent. It does not deny the horror of Slemmer’s murder.
The petition also asks him to consider whether death remains an appropriate punishment when the person who committed the crime was 18, had suffered years of documented childhood sexual abuse and entered the capital sentencing process without the jury hearing that history in full.
That makes Governor Lee the most important decision-maker in Pike’s case now.Tennessee’s own Attorney General’s Office explains the distinction clearly. Appeals are for the courts. Clemency is different.
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In a capital case, the authority to grant or deny clemency rests solely with the governor. A governor can commute a death sentence to life imprisonment or grant a pardon. The Tennessee Board of Parole can review clemency applications and make recommendations, but those recommendations are non-binding. The governor has the final word.
So what does the public know about the man who now has that power? Bill Lee is not a lawyer. His official biography says he studied mechanical engineering at Auburn University before returning to Tennessee and joining his family’s mechanical-construction business. He eventually became president of Lee Company. He has served as governor since 2019.
There is therefore no legal career from which to draw conclusions about how he will analyse Pike’s case. His record as governor is more relevant. And that record tells a complicated story.
Lee has already faced a capital clemency decision involving a condemned prisoner. In August 2019, he rejected Stephen West’s request for clemency and announced that “the State of Tennessee’s sentence will stand”.
He said the decision followed a review of West’s request and the case. That is an important precedent because it demonstrates that Lee is prepared to allow an execution to proceed after personally considering a clemency request. But it is not a prediction of what he will do with Pike. There is an even more important piece of history, and it comes from a governor who occupied the same office before him.
In 2007, Governor Phil Bredesen commuted the death sentence of Michael Joe Boyd to life without parole. Bredesen was concerned that Boyd’s legal representation had been so inadequate that significant claims about his sentencing had never been comprehensively examined. He described himself not as a substitute juror, but as a “backstop” for the justice system.
That is precisely why Boyd’s case has resonance in Pike’s. Bredesen did not commute Boyd’s sentence because he concluded that the murder did not happen. He intervened because he believed the machinery of justice had failed to give the capital sentence the confidence it required.
His concern was that inadequate legal representation and procedural limitations had prevented a proper examination of whether the jury would have imposed death had the defence been competently presented Bredesen made another capital commutation four years later. In 2011, he commuted Edward Jerome Harbison’s death sentence to life without parole. Harbison had been convicted of murder and had been found by the courts to have borderline intellectual disability and a history of childhood trauma. Bredesen said the crime was heinous but concluded that, compared with other cases, it did not warrant execution. Those decisions establish something important about the office Lee now occupies.
A governor’s clemency power is not simply a ceremonial signature at the end of a judicial process. It is an extraordinary constitutional safety valve. It exists precisely because there can be circumstances in which the ordinary legal process has reached its endpoint but a governor believes the ultimate punishment should nevertheless not be carried out.
Pike’s lawyers are asking Lee to exercise that power. Their argument rests heavily on information about Pike’s childhood that the jury did not hear as mitigation. According to the current clemency case, Pike suffered repeated sexual abuse beginning in childhood. She was raped at 11 and again at 17, approximately a year before Slemmer was murdered. The state has not disputed the core factual claims concerning that abuse.
That evidence does not excuse murder. It does, however, go directly to the question that a capital sentencing jury was supposed to confront whether the defendant’s life history, age, mental condition and circumstances made death the appropriate punishment.
The historical record makes the omission especially significant because Pike’s defence team had information about her background. A mitigation specialist had prepared an extensive social history, but the planned presentation of that material was abandoned before the sentencing jury heard it.
Courts later rejected Pike’s claims of ineffective assistance of counsel. The clemency petition now asks the governor to look at the same history through the broader lens of executive mercy. Lee is not being asked to overturn a judicial verdict. He is being asked whether, after everything that has happened in the intervening 31 years, Tennessee should still carry out the death sentence.
The circumstances surrounding Pike also make the decision unusually consequential. Her lawyers point out that Tennessee has never executed anyone in the modern era who was 18 at the time of the offence. The seven other people sentenced to death in Tennessee in the modern era for crimes committed at 18 have all had their death sentences vacated.
The other young person involved in Slemmer’s murder, Tadaryl Shipp, was 17 and therefore could not receive a death sentence. He received life imprisonment and is now eligible for parole. Another participant, Shadolla Peterson, testified against Pike and Shipp and received probation. That does not resolve Pike’s culpability. But it gives Lee another question to weigh: whether the extraordinary difference between the punishments imposed on three teenagers should influence the exercise of executive mercy. There is also a striking irony surrounding Lee’s record.
In 2024, he signed legislation expanding Tennessee’s death penalty to cover aggravated rape of a child. That law has been challenged under the United States Constitution, because the Supreme Court has held that the death penalty cannot be imposed where the victim was not killed.
Now Lee has before him a condemned prisoner whose lawyers say she was herself repeatedly raped as a child. That coincidence does not dictate the governor’s decision. But it inevitably gives the Pike case a wider moral and political dimension.
Lee has said little publicly about what he will do. His office has confirmed that the clemency petition is before him, while Tennessee’s formal process allows the governor to consider the Board of Parole’s recommendation before making the final decision.
The governor recently granted executive clemency to 34 people in non-capital cases, demonstrating that clemency remains an active part of his administration. But Pike presents an entirely different test.Governor Lee has already shown, in the Stephen West case, that he is willing to let a death sentence stand.
The historical record of the office, however, shows that Tennessee governors have also used clemency as a backstop when doubts remain about the fairness or completeness of the process that produced a death sentence.
He does not have to decide whether Christa Pike deserves forgiveness. He does not have to decide whether Colleen Slemmer’s family has suffered enough. He does not have to declare that Pike’s childhood explains away the murder.
He has to decide something narrower and more consequential. Whether Tennessee should take the irreversible step of killing a woman whose life before the crime, whose age at the time and whose documented history of abuse were not fully placed before the jury that sentenced her to death The courts have had their say. Now its time for the governor to have his.
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