Woman Set for Execution in Tennessee: 'I Am at Peace'

Tennessee is on track to execute its only woman on death row, after Gov. Bill Lee on Monday declined to intervene in the case of Christa Pike, condemned for a 1995 torture killing in Knoxville. Lee offered no explanation in upholding the death sentence, per USA Today. Pike, 50, is scheduled to die by lethal injection on Wednesday and would be the first woman executed in the state in more than two centuries if the courts don't step in.

Pike's lawyers and more than 100 advocacy groups and experts had urged Lee to commute her sentence to life, citing a childhood marked by rapes and arguing that being strapped down for execution would re-create that trauma and violate the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Tennessee courts rejected those claims; Pike's last chance is now with the US Supreme Court. "I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid," Pike said in her statement asking for clemency, per the AP. "It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I'd done. ... It sickens me now to think I had the ability to commit such a crime."

Pike has indicated she's ready for what comes next. "Whether my clemency is granted or not, I am at peace," she told NBC News before Lee's decision. "I am not afraid to die. I'm only nervous about the process." She has also linked her own case to that of another name in the headlines. "I have a kinship with Lindsay Clancy," she recently told the Times of London, referring to the Massachusetts mom accused of killing her three young children during an alleged episode of postpartum psychosis. Pike noted that Clancy had wandered "into trouble because of uniquely female issues."

The mother of Pike's victim, Colleen Slemmer, plans to attend Pike's execution. "Maybe now finally we have the justice," May Martinez tells WKRN. "It may not bring my daughter back, but it might save another person from getting killed." WBAL notes that the case has put the spotlight back on women who've been executed in the modern era in the United States—only 18 since 1977, or just 1% of all those put to death. Scientists have also found that an overwhelming majority of female inmates on death row—96%—had been sexually assaulted, sexually abused as children, or domestic violence survivors before ending up behind bars.