As Tennessee prepares to execute Christa Pike in September—its first woman executed in more than 200 years—experts and advocates say the conditions and scrutiny faced by women on death row can be harsher, more humiliating, and more isolating than for men.
Christa Pike will be held in an all-male prison for the final days before her execution—an arrangement her attorneys say turns punishment into something more personal than the sentence itself. Tennessee has set her lethal-injection execution for September for the 1995 killing of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in Knoxville.
If the execution goes forward despite a botched execution in Tennessee last month. Pike would become the first woman executed in the state in more than 200 years and the 19th woman executed in modern U.S. history. For advocates. the timing is what makes this case feel so stark: Pike is at the end of a process that. they argue. has repeatedly punished women in ways tied to gender—not just to the crime.
At the center of the controversy is not only Pike’s death warrant. but what her life leading up to it has looked like inside the prison system. When Tennessee sentenced her 30 years ago. it faced a decision it would not have to make for male inmates: where to house the only woman with a death sentence in the state. Pike could not be placed on death row because Tennessee’s death row is all male. so officials chose to keep her alone.
Her attorneys say Pike spent 27 years in what they describe as solitary confinement. In their account, it meant she had no community and no brotherhood of other death-row inmates—only herself. They say she had no access to the routine social and group life other condemned prisoners can have. including meals shared with others. religious services together. work alongside peers. and classes.
“Ms. Pike has been subjected to solitary confinement in a cell the size of a parking space. where she has had nearly no meaningful human contact. ” her attorneys wrote in a 2022 lawsuit against the state. They also argued that the conditions had “a devastating impact on her mental and physical health” and that the “cumulative effect” of the punishment “has deprived Ms. Pike of basic constitutional guarantees of humane treatment.”.
Pike’s attorneys and the state eventually reached a settlement. Under that agreement, she was allowed to interact with other women, work, and spend more time outside her cell, with the privileges depending on good behavior.
That dispute over space, contact, and daily life is part of a wider argument that women on death row experience a separate kind of harm—one that can stretch from courtrooms to cellblocks.
Stephanie Covington. a Southern California-based clinician who specializes in trauma-informed responses to violence. and Barbara Bloom. a professor emeritus in criminal justice at Sonoma State University in California. said women prisoners often receive what they describe as worse treatment compared with men. The system, they say, can be unfair and undignified in ways that go beyond the legal sentence.
In courtroom decisions, advocates point to how women are portrayed—sometimes through their sexuality, sometimes through gendered stereotypes. That pattern has been described in the case of Brenda Andrew in Oklahoma, who remains on death row. The details of her trial illustrate how gender can become the prosecution’s language.
In an Oklahoma courtroom. as Brenda Andrew sat quietly. a prosecutor held up a pair of her thong underwear for jurors and asked whether a grieving widow would wear such a “sexy undergarment.” The jury heard from five witnesses about how Andrew dressed—described in court records as low-cut shirts and short skirts—along with testimony about her sexual history and proclivities. Her attorneys say jurors were told she liked to skinny-dip in her hot tub and that she was a “hoochie” and a “slut puppy.”.
Andrew was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death in 2004. After more than 20 years, she remains on Oklahoma’s death row.
A federal appeals judge later criticized the approach. In 2023, 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Robert Bacharach wrote that prosecutors portrayed Andrew as “a scarlet woman. a modern Jezebel.” He said prosecutors continuously focused on her sex life “sparking distrust based on her loose morals” and “plucking away any realistic chance” that jurors would seriously consider her version of events.
The U.S. Supreme Court later ruled in Andrew’s favor and ordered the lower court to review her claim of an unfair trial. The higher court noted that the prosecution acknowledged that Andrew’s sex life and her failings as a mother and wife were largely irrelevant to whether she killed her husband. The lower court upheld Andrew’s conviction and death sentence earlier this year.
Those courtroom battles can also connect to the way defense lawyers are expected to advocate during sentencing. Mary Atwell. a retired professor and author who has studied women on death row. said it is common for defense attorneys to fail to present key mitigating evidence—especially evidence about trauma.
Atwell said that in her research. almost every woman she studied had experienced abuse and neglect as children. poverty. mental illness. and then addictions formed as a means of escape. She argued. “There’s almost nobody who had a decent defense lawyer presenting these mitigating circumstances.” In her view. prosecutors frequently portrayed those histories as bad motherhood. loose women. or sometimes as lesbians or unnatural women—so by the time women got decent representation. it was too late.
Christa Pike’s case is where those arguments collide hardest with her present circumstances. According to her attorneys. Pike’s childhood included years of sexual abuse. multiple rapes. parental neglect. brain damage caused by exposure to alcohol in the womb. and at least one suicide attempt. They also say that one year before she killed Colleen Slemmer. Pike was attacked and raped by the side of a road at age 17.
Her attorneys argue that jurors considering her fate never heard about the full scope of that trauma, leaving them unable to weigh meaningfully whether she might deserve to be spared from the death penalty. The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected those arguments.
Inside prisons, the advocates’ claims shift from courtroom rhetoric to daily treatment. In interviews about gendered mistreatment in custody, Ashlee Sellars described how her experience as a young woman in Tennessee’s system echoed themes she said she saw in prisons beyond the state.
Sellars was 17 when she was arrested and charged with felony murder for a fatal shooting she did not commit. Her accomplice, 18-year-old Daniel Hunley, shot and killed a woman during a robbery in Nashville in 1995. Because the felony murder rule treats everyone involved as equally culpable when a crime turns fatal. Sellars—despite waiting in a nearby car—was charged.
She was released in 2017 at age 37 after spending 21 years in prison. Sellars told of disparate treatment she said began when she was charged because she was a juvenile at 17 and authorities couldn’t place her in lock-up with adults, but the charge was too serious to house her with other minors.
She said that while there were boys her age housed together for serious crimes, she was the only girl. As a result, she described being in solitary confinement for nine months until she turned 18. She said she did not have the same privileges as the boys—such as going outside or getting schooling—because guards “apparently forgot about her.” She said they sometimes forgot to feed her.
Sellars also described what she said was mistreatment by a male guard whom she described as “perverse. inappropriate and aggressive.” When she talked back to him. she said he pepper-sprayed her. shoved her against a wall. and told her. “If you want to act like an adult I will (expletive) you like an adult.” She said a male and a female guard stripped her naked and made her shower to remove the pepper spray.
At the time, she was 17.
Sellars said other treatment ranged from “petty to embarrassing.” She described strip searches that. she said. are more humiliating for women than men—because of menstrual cycles. “They want you to strip naked and you have to remove your tampon and spread your lips so they can make you sure don’t have any contraband inside your vagina. ” she said.
She also said that tampons and pads were limited, and she described women left with no choice but to openly bleed.
Then there were the knock-on consequences from male prisoners’ misconduct. Sellars said she lost privileges because of a male prisoner’s wrongdoing. She said that when someone at a men’s prison used a dumbbell to assault someone. she and other women at the prison where she was housed lost all their hand weights. She said that for the remainder of her 18 years behind bars. she never got to lift weights again. while she said new guards told her that men were able to use them. She described the added burden for women who can’t lift weights, saying the struggle is unique to osteoporosis.
“My dignity and my humanity were stripped from me,” Sellars said.
Experts interviewed in the story said Sellars’ experience was not unique to her or to Tennessee, but widespread in jails and prisons across the United States.
Atwell said the public should care because the state prosecutes and punishes people “in our name.” She said. “Prosecutors. judges. corrections officers all are acting for ‘the people.’” In her account. they have authority to carry out the sentence decided in court. “but they do not have the authority to inflict pain.”.
Babcock said women on death row “endure torturous and degrading prison conditions that go far beyond what is necessary to maintain a safe environment.” She argued that the public cannot see the conditions and that prisoners are viewed as less than human. which she said helps explain why there is no public outcry about “the torture that we inflict on incarcerated people. including women.”.
For Pike, the final phase of her case is now approaching. Babcock said Pike’s death watch in a male prison will be carried out by men. and the execution team will be comprised primarily of men. who will strap her down and kill her. The law professor said that for a victim of years of sexual abuse. the experience carries a level of torment that men don’t necessarily face.
With three months to go before Tennessee plans to execute Pike, the case is drawing attention to a question that repeatedly shadows women facing death: when the legal punishment is fixed, what happens to the rest of the suffering—and who gets to decide it.
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