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American murderer on death row (born 1976)
Christa Gail Pike is an American convicted murderer on death row in Tennessee. In 1995, when she was 18, Pike and her boyfriend lured their 19-year-old classmate Colleen Slemmer into a wooded area in Knoxville where they tortured and killed her. Slemmer was beaten, slashed, and had a pentagram carved in her chest before Pike killed her by crushing her skull. Pike was arrested within two days and sentenced to death in 1996 at the age of 20, making her one of the youngest women to receive a death sentence in the United States during the post-Furman period.
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U.S. state
Tennessee, officially the State of Tennessee, is a landlocked state in the Southeastern region of the United States. It borders Kentucky to the north, Virginia to the northeast, North Carolina to the east, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi to the south, Arkansas to the southwest, and Missouri to the northwest. Tennessee is the 36th-largest by area and the 15th-most populous of the 50 states. According to the United States Census Bureau, the state's estimated population as of 2024 is 7.22 million.
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Christa Pike, who has regained consciousness and is speaking a week Tennessee failed to execute her, is believed to be the only person to survive after receiving lethal injection drugs during an execution. But Pike is not the first inmate to survive a botched execution attempt.
Tennessee could still execute Pike, 50, the only woman on its death row. Her legal fate hinges on what it does next.
After Tennessee death row inmate Christa Pike survived two doses of a lethal injection drug, could the death penalty be off the table? A capital punishment expert weighs in.