October 8, 2025 • 29 mins
As the decades-long effort to overturn her death sentence runs out of time, Christa and her legal team try to prove that she’s a changed person.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
I am a very different person now than I was
thirty years ago. In certain ways, I'm still the same.
I'm still a very loving person, a very compassionate person,
a very affectionate person, but I have a mental illness
(00:24):
that is treated now.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
So over the last thirty years on death Row, a
lot has changed for Krista, even as much as stayed
the same. She's been medicated for her mental illness, She's
engaged in therapy and undergone brain scans. She says she
spent time trying to understand what she did and why
she did it, and how she might become a better person.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
I feel like I was really misunderstood. I was very
loving and wanted to be loved, and I'm still very
buved and what they loved that. I know what that
means now as in a healthy way as you know.
Speaker 3 (01:09):
Then.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
I didn't understand what what healthy love looks like, and
I do now. I feel I don't know I'm someone
over my words.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
The idea that Krista can and has changed even as
she sits in solitary is at the heart of the
final efforts to save her life, But her decades of
appeals focused on the problems at her trial, what the
jury heard, but more important, what they didn't hear about
her short life before her arrest. Her attorneys say that
(01:44):
she is now someone loving and remorseful and generous, someone
who deserves to live. But the decades long process of
trying to save her life by convincing a court that
she didn't get a fair trial, that her attorney was
ineffective hasn't been easy. I think we just need to
understand the appellate process.
Speaker 4 (02:05):
So she's convicted a trial, there's a direct appeal that
I believe that her trial council handled that. Then at
that point, because it's a death case, that goes up
to the Tennessee Supreme Court.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
Sarah Trelevan and I are sitting in Randy Spidey's office.
He's a post conviction defense attorney in Nashville and he's
been a part of Christa's legal team for five years.
Speaker 4 (02:29):
Then it comes back to our office, and then it
begins to work its way through the post conviction process,
which is back in the trial court but very limited
to constitutional issues and effective assistance of counsel, that kind
of thing.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
We're both staring at Randy trying to absorb this incredibly
dense and lengthy process.
Speaker 4 (02:48):
This is what I did when I taught folks.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
Randy takes out a post it note and he starts
to draw little boxes, leading to more little boxes until
we can clearly see the flow chart of three decades
of trying to save Christa's life.
Speaker 4 (03:04):
So Trial CCA UH Spring Court, Tennessee Supreme Court, US
Spring Court is up here, and then I.
Speaker 5 (03:12):
Might have to take this to Keinotsen.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
Since her conviction in nineteen ninety six, Christa's case has
bounced around Tennessee's state and federal courts. The nine basic
steps in her appellate process primarily challenged the constitutionality of
issues at the trial, violations of the sixth Amendment right
to effective council, for example, and over the years, Christa's
(03:37):
team has made several key arguments, many of them stemming
from that right to effective council, but other issues raised
included that the court should have granted the motion for
a change in venue, that death by electrocution is cruel
and unusual punishment, that Christa has brain damage, likely from
her premature birth and from her mother's drink, which later
(04:01):
showed up in brain scans. It goes on and on
and the whole time Christa has been sitting in solitary.
Speaker 6 (04:11):
Obviously she has run through all of her appeals, They've
all been denied.
Speaker 2 (04:17):
This is Molly Kinkaid, another of Christa's lawyers. Christa's team
has only two options left. First, a request for a
certificate of commutation, meaning a request that her sentence be
reduced from death to life in prison, that is currently
before the Tennessee Supreme Court. The court is considering several
(04:38):
arguments already made in Christa's numerous appeals, but also that
nearly two hundred females in Tennessee convicted of first degree
murder receive life sentences, yet Christa, a traumatized, mentally ill teen,
received death, a sentence no female teen has received in
the US in the modern era. Second option, their Hail Mary,
(05:02):
is for clemency, essentially a plead to Governor Bill Lee
to show mercy on Christa's life. That's what her team
is currently focused on. One of the key arguments relates
to a two thousand and five US Supreme Court decision
that set a national standard that individuals under the age
(05:22):
of eighteen could not be executed for their crimes. Krista
was eighteen at the time she killed Colleen, so the
decision doesn't free her from death row, but her legal
team thinks maybe it could get a court or the
governor to start thinking differently about who she was at
the time of the murder and who she's become in
the decades, since.
Speaker 6 (05:44):
She's grown a lot in prison, and she's become a
person that perhaps she always was meant to be.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
I'm Beth Carris, and this is unrestorable Season two Proof
of Life, an original podcas asked from anonymous content and iHeartRadio.
So when it comes to that bright line of saying,
if you're this age, you can do this and or
(06:16):
you know you can't do that unless you're twenty one,
I mean, like, how old in Tennessee do you have
to be to drive a car?
Speaker 4 (06:23):
Sixteen? Vote eighteen, drink twenty.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
One, get married without parental permission.
Speaker 4 (06:29):
I have no idea about eighteen.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
I believe it's eighteen.
Speaker 4 (06:34):
Die for your country, Oh eighteen, yeah, but rent a
car twenty five?
Speaker 5 (06:39):
Yes?
Speaker 4 (06:39):
Yeah, because we don't trust them to drive a car,
and we shouldn't.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
The idea of youth and diminished responsibility that teenagers simply
aren't capable of handling certain things is already well baked
into our system. But the US Supreme Court's decision Robri v.
Simmons in two thousand and five was a clear line
in the sand. The execution of juveniles those under eighteen
(07:05):
at the time of their crime violated the eighth and
fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution, the prohibition on cruel and
Unusual punishment, and the right to do process in equal
protection under the law. Just as Anthony Kennedy, writing for
a five to four majority decision, stated that quote society
views juveniles as categorically less culpable end quote than other defendants,
(07:30):
he also concluded that quote when a juvenile offender commits
a heinous crime, the state can exact forfeiture of some
of the most basic liberties, but the state cannot extinguish
his life and his potential to attain a mature understanding
of his own humanity end quote. The implication was clear,
Those who committed even heinous crimes at an early age
(07:52):
must be given the opportunity to change.
Speaker 4 (07:56):
It's not that they're broken if they get better, and
we know they get better, but there's a diminished sense
of consequence.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
And that is the case for everything young people do,
whether they're shoplifting or robbing someone or murdering.
Speaker 4 (08:11):
Tattoos or whatever like, there's no sense of what's in
the future.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
In his opinion, just as Kennedy acknowledged the arbitrariness of
imposing a line between seventeen and eighteen, the idea that
a few months or even a single day might be
the difference between life and death, Christa is the youngest
(08:39):
woman sentenced to death in the US in the modern era,
and that arbitrariness seems particularly stark in her case. Her
boyfriend to Daryl and Christa killed calling together. But to
Daryl is a year younger than Krista, so he was
sentenced to life in prison and will be eligible for
parole later this year.
Speaker 7 (09:00):
Knowing what we know about adolescent brain development, and there's
no distinction between a seventeen year old and an eighteen year.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
Old, this is Kelly Gleeson, one of Christa's attorneys.
Speaker 7 (09:11):
Then why should the State of Tennessee proceed with killing
an eighteen year old.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
It's not normal to kill people, and it requires a
set of circumstances to place into some kind of context,
and those circumstances have to include our brain and how
it functions.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
This is doctor Cecil Reynolds, emeritus Professor of Educational Psychology
and Professor of Neuroscience at Texas A and M University.
He's often called as an expert in cases involving youth
and the death penalty, and he says that adult and
adolescent brains are very different.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
The frontal regions can control what the limbic system is
telling us to do and can modulate that behavior, and
unfortunately those brain systems don't develop at the same time.
They don't mature at the same time. Your limbic system
(10:16):
matures years before your frontal systems do.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
The limbic system dictates basic survival instincts, sometimes causing us
to lash out, while the frontal lobes manage self control.
What that means is that the parts of the brain
we rely on to rein in our most volatile and
least rational behavior simply haven't fully matured by the time
we hit eighteen.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
The limbic system often wins that that battle or control.
So that's the fundamental basis of what some people will
refer to as the team brain Disconnected. It's not really
a disconnect. The connection's just not there yet in a
mature way that allows the system to function as it's
(11:06):
designed to function, because it's still developing, and there's a
lot of debate over when that maturation occurs, but there's
no debate that it's after twenty one.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Doctor Reynolds says that all of this means that a
teenager or anyone younger than twenty one, is more prone
to impulsivity and poor decision making, less capable of meaningfully
considering not just consequences but the overarching morality of any action.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
They're just highly reactive. What's best for me in this nanosecond?
What do I need to do to get away? I
don't know how many times I've had a defendant tell
me when I asked, why did you kill them? I
didn't know anything else to do. And you particular hear
(12:00):
that the younger of the defendant, So that speaks volumes
as well. So the brain processes involved in that moment
of hot cognition and their inability to find alternative behaviors,
alternative ways of acting that wouldn't put them on death road.
(12:24):
And by the way, the prospect of being caught in
charge with capital murder has zero to do with their
decision making. It doesn't deter a nineteen year old at all.
These are not carefully planned crimes where they set out
to kill somebody.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
The answer to grappling with diminished responsibility, says doctor Reynolds,
is by diminishing the consequences that people who commit their
crimes at eighteen, nineteen, and even twenty should not be
held to the same standards as fully mature adults.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
Raising the age of eligibility for death from seventeen to
eighteen was steeped in science. So what we're trying to
do now is put the science that we have back
in front of the court system and legislatures and say
there's good scientific reason to raise this age of eligibility
(13:24):
for death as a penalty from eighteen to twenty one.
We're going to have proper development of those communication fibers.
That's going to happen, which is another reason why people change.
Not only can they change, they are going to change,
take some people longer than others.
Speaker 5 (13:46):
And what do we do now that we didn't know
when Krista was sentenced to death.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
Huge changes into science of brain function and our ability
to image brain is so much better now than it
was third years ago. You can appeal a guilt verdict
on the basis of new science that would be persuasive
to a jury, that would demonstrate reasonable doubt or actual innocence.
(14:13):
But you can't get a new penalty here daring on
the basis of new science. And why shouldn't a jury
hear that before she's executed.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
I feel old in so many ways, and still stuck
at eighteen in so many ways because I grew in
a concrete boxes here. I've been in solitary confinement for
thirty years, living in a room by myself. I just
turned forty nine, and I feel way older than that
in so many ways.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
It's hard to compare Christa's life over the last thirty
years to anything familiar. So many of our common milestones,
going to college, finding a job, getting married, having kids,
finding a home, even worrying if you filed your taxes right,
they never happened to Krista. Instead, those years have been
spent in a concrete cell with one plexiglass window. Krista
(15:14):
has managed to carve out a life for herself inside
the debrak K Johnson Rehabilitation Center, but it's been a
long road, just.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
Being able to wake up in the morning and want
to be awake, want to be alive, not having to
struggle to communicate with people, not feeling as it's like
when you're about polar and you're awake for days, you
feel like it really is an illness.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
Christa's life improved significantly when she was finally properly diagnosed
with bipolar disorder and PTSD in her mid twenties.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
It's like you're walking around with no skin, your nerves
are raw, you're physically in pain, you're mentally in pain.
It's horrible and there's no really from it. So everything
is a noxious stimuli that comes at you from every direction.
And so to just be able to walk around and
(16:12):
be normal and have normal conversations, normal interactions, eat normally,
sweet normally, and just live as a normal human being
is amazing.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
As a death row inmate, Krista is not eligible for
formal rehabilitation programs, but she has had access to therapy.
Speaker 8 (16:33):
When you have people who have been incarcerated for a
long time, they kind of experience burnout of their own.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
Ali Winters is a social worker who started working with
Krista in twenty twelve. At the time, Krista was medicated
and stable, but she was frustrated with the turnover and
mental health professionals in the prison.
Speaker 8 (16:53):
Like, I'm so tired of telling my story over and
over and over again, answering the same questions over and
over and over again, simply because I now have a
new therapist and over time there's a level of resistance.
Speaker 5 (17:12):
One of the things that really occurred to me when
I was reading through the reams of mitigation in Christa's case,
very very very revealing personal details. You know of the
worst moments in Christa's life, so you know, everyone now
knows who she was molested by, everyone knows about her
being raped. It's in the public record. Every aspect of
(17:35):
your life becomes fodder for this system.
Speaker 8 (17:37):
Yeah, yeah, And I think maybe this is why Christa
engaged in the therapeutic process so much. She got to
dictate what she needed from me, and that's exactly what
she got.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
To gain back a small sice of control exactly.
Speaker 9 (18:00):
Chris has been held in solitary confinement longer than I've
been alive. I don't know how to wrap my head
around that. I think it's a despicable thing to do.
To anybody.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
This is Anna sent an investigator who works with Christa's
legal team, mostly tracking down mitigation evidence.
Speaker 9 (18:15):
Even if you consider those on death row the worst
of the worst, to torture somebody like that, it's inhumane.
So Christa, in spite of the environment she's been in,
has chosen to be a compassionate person. Like she should
have evolved into just psychosis and she should be completely
detached from reality. She is not. Christa is a person
(18:37):
who builds relationships with people, who has intellectual interests, who
cares about others, who has a life, and that is
against the odds of an incredibly painful and dehumanizing life
that she lives. So I think if you look at
Christa in the context of that, and say thirty years
after this crime, Chris is somebody who shows remorse who
(18:58):
other people who are incarcated with her, they describe her
as a light on the unit, somebody who booies everybody
else's emotions. She doesn't get to see people face to face.
What Christa does is she talks to people through the events.
She encourages them when people get on the unit. I'm
gonna cry because Chris is a remarkable person. When people
come and they don't have support, she sends them food,
(19:21):
she sends them hygiene products. It is incredible to see
somebody who has been through so much, who has been
ostracized and made out to be entreated like a monster.
To see somebody with that history, with that narrative, in
these conditions who chooses to give things, not because she
receives anything. She isn't getting things from the women who
(19:47):
she gives food and hygiene products to. She doesn't get
things from the other people that she chooses to be
compassionate towards. She does that because that's who she is.
So if you're thinking about Krista and her progression as
the person I think we see now is the person
that could have been thirty years ago had she received
the right supports.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
We heard over and over from the people closest to
Christa that she has become a loving, caring, generous person
who has worked very hard to create some kind of
better life for herself, even though confined to a prison cell.
But does that make what she did forgivable enough to
overturn her death sentence. That is a question now for
(20:30):
the Tennessee Supreme Court or the governor.
Speaker 10 (20:34):
The anger that people feel when they hear about violent
crime is just this instinctive revulsion and disgust, and they
want to hit back. It's like, you know, being hit
by somebody on the playground as a kid. Your first
reaction is you want to hit him right back.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
Sandra Babcock, a law professor at Cornell University and an
expert on women in the death penalty, says that part
of the sticking power of a death sentence is that
we gravitate towards the simplicity of retribution, and that's.
Speaker 10 (21:07):
The challenge I think with people who know how the
death penalty is applied in practice, and they know that
it doesn't deter, they know the social science data, and
they also know that it doesn't protect, it doesn't make
people safer, and it's also bad penal policy. But those
(21:27):
kinds of rational arguments don't land with people emotionally. When
they hear about violent crime. They just want to punish
because it makes them feel like that person is getting
their just desserts. Executing ten more people in the year
(21:49):
that Christa was arrested for her crime would not have
stopped that crime. What would have stopped that crime is
if the state has invested in child protection services that
were thoughtful and that were attentive, and that were focused
(22:10):
on providing meaningful support to families that needed it, that
were able to pick up on the red flags that
were present in Christa's case, Like that's what could have
stopped that crime. But it's so much more complicated, right
than that very clean, Like she was just evil and
(22:31):
because she's evil, the only way that we can put
an end to this is just by killing her.
Speaker 5 (22:37):
To look at a case like Christa's and say, well, fundamentally,
maybe there are there's no villain. That doesn't mean that
somebody you know didn't do something absolutely horrific, But this
isn't a battle between good and evil.
Speaker 10 (22:52):
One of the things that I find oddly uplifting about
doing death penalty work is the not knowledge that there
are no evil people in the world. Like you grow
up thinking that there are evil people. It's what we're
told by movies and TV shows and the media, and
(23:13):
we grow up terrified of these evil people that are
out there. And if there's nothing else that I've learned
in the nearly thirty five years that I've been defending
people on death row, it is that there are no
evil people. There are people who do evil things, but
those people are deeply human, They are deeply flawed, and
(23:37):
they are very damaged. That is the story of violent
crime that nobody is telling.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
Sandra says that the clemency process, the official mechanism for
requesting mercy for someone on death row and decided by
the governor, is.
Speaker 10 (23:58):
Brokenriginally, clemency was an act of grace. Clemency was a
fail safe. It wasn't designed to prevent innocent people from
being executed, because those people should be pardoned, they should
not be in prison at all. It was designed as
a way of recognizing people who had either turned themselves
(24:21):
around or had something that called out for an act
of grace and mercy. Clemency as it is currently practiced
in most states has lost that original purpose. It is
now seen as something that is only available for people
(24:42):
who are typically possibly innocent, and that is simply not
its function. So there is no fail safe. There is
no way that the legal system has sort of built
in a way of taking account of redemption and rehabilitation.
(25:03):
And that's one way in which our current prison system
has gotten so far removed from its original purpose. Right
its original purpose Departments of Corrections was to get people
ready to re enter society. You know, implicit in the
name Department of Corrections is that people can be corrected,
that people can change, and we have lost that.
Speaker 5 (25:26):
Why do you think we've lost that?
Speaker 10 (25:29):
I think partly it's politics. Politicians feel that they are
going to be punished for exercising mercy. I think that
they see it as a sign of weakness rather than
a sign of strength. And it's also due to these
(25:49):
narratives that we tell about people. The United States is
such a punitive country. It always has been, and I
think that tendency is only getting worse.
Speaker 11 (26:07):
I think we have a myth about our justice system
that comes through the news and popular media.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
This is Steve Ferrell, one of Christa's lawyers.
Speaker 11 (26:18):
But I think that there's something about how doing this
fixes problems and that victims are made whole once someone
has been the victim. However, in a murder, rape, even robbery,
so it changes the victim and the victim will never
be whole. And we've developed a myth about our super
(26:44):
effective justice system that it does make people whole and
it can't.
Speaker 2 (26:51):
At the heart of the retribution narrative, is the idea
that the balancing of the scales is possible. When we
talk about Christa spending twenty three hours a day in
a cell, others point out that Colleen doesn't even have that,
That Kristom might demonstrate some kind of generosity to her
fellow inmates, but Colleen never got the chance to show
the world how generous she could be. That Christa robbed
(27:14):
Colleen and Colleen's family of everything, and the only way
to make things right is to take everything from Christa,
including her life.
Speaker 11 (27:24):
When we talk about justice, I think we ignore that
real justice is impossible on certain things, and that real
fairness will never be achieved in any way.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
Perceptions of injustice and isolation have cultivated what seems like
unique devotion on the parts of Christal's lawyers as they
try to save her life. But death row lawyers often
develop close relationships with their clients in part because there's
some of the few people exposed to their client's humanity
in the context of a wildly dehumanizing situation.
Speaker 7 (28:02):
I see you as a human being. I see what
you've alleged to have done, and if you did it,
you know I don't. That doesn't matter to me. I
still care about you, and I will fight for you
and we will get the best outcome possible. And it's
very rewarding to me because it's asking people to trust
to reveal the darkest, hardest secrets, the scratches on their heart.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
That's next time on Proof of Life.
Speaker 5 (28:32):
Unrestorable is executive produced and hosted by Me, Sarah Tchulevin,
and Beth Carris, Mixing and sound design by Rezadiya for
Anonymous Content. Jessica Grimshaw is our executive producer, Jennifer Sears
is our executive in charge of production, and Nicole Pronk
is our legal counsel for iHeart executive producer Christina Everett
(28:54):
and supervising producer Abu Zaphar
I am a very different person now than I was
thirty years ago. In certain ways, I'm still the same.
I'm still a very loving person, a very compassionate person,
a very affectionate person, but I have a mental illness
(00:24):
that is treated now.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
So over the last thirty years on death Row, a
lot has changed for Krista, even as much as stayed
the same. She's been medicated for her mental illness, She's
engaged in therapy and undergone brain scans. She says she
spent time trying to understand what she did and why
she did it, and how she might become a better person.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
I feel like I was really misunderstood. I was very
loving and wanted to be loved, and I'm still very
buved and what they loved that. I know what that
means now as in a healthy way as you know.
Speaker 3 (01:09):
Then.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
I didn't understand what what healthy love looks like, and
I do now. I feel I don't know I'm someone
over my words.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
The idea that Krista can and has changed even as
she sits in solitary is at the heart of the
final efforts to save her life, But her decades of
appeals focused on the problems at her trial, what the
jury heard, but more important, what they didn't hear about
her short life before her arrest. Her attorneys say that
(01:44):
she is now someone loving and remorseful and generous, someone
who deserves to live. But the decades long process of
trying to save her life by convincing a court that
she didn't get a fair trial, that her attorney was
ineffective hasn't been easy. I think we just need to
understand the appellate process.
Speaker 4 (02:05):
So she's convicted a trial, there's a direct appeal that
I believe that her trial council handled that. Then at
that point, because it's a death case, that goes up
to the Tennessee Supreme Court.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
Sarah Trelevan and I are sitting in Randy Spidey's office.
He's a post conviction defense attorney in Nashville and he's
been a part of Christa's legal team for five years.
Speaker 4 (02:29):
Then it comes back to our office, and then it
begins to work its way through the post conviction process,
which is back in the trial court but very limited
to constitutional issues and effective assistance of counsel, that kind
of thing.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
We're both staring at Randy trying to absorb this incredibly
dense and lengthy process.
Speaker 4 (02:48):
This is what I did when I taught folks.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
Randy takes out a post it note and he starts
to draw little boxes, leading to more little boxes until
we can clearly see the flow chart of three decades
of trying to save Christa's life.
Speaker 4 (03:04):
So Trial CCA UH Spring Court, Tennessee Supreme Court, US
Spring Court is up here, and then I.
Speaker 5 (03:12):
Might have to take this to Keinotsen.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
Since her conviction in nineteen ninety six, Christa's case has
bounced around Tennessee's state and federal courts. The nine basic
steps in her appellate process primarily challenged the constitutionality of
issues at the trial, violations of the sixth Amendment right
to effective council, for example, and over the years, Christa's
(03:37):
team has made several key arguments, many of them stemming
from that right to effective council, but other issues raised
included that the court should have granted the motion for
a change in venue, that death by electrocution is cruel
and unusual punishment, that Christa has brain damage, likely from
her premature birth and from her mother's drink, which later
(04:01):
showed up in brain scans. It goes on and on
and the whole time Christa has been sitting in solitary.
Speaker 6 (04:11):
Obviously she has run through all of her appeals, They've
all been denied.
Speaker 2 (04:17):
This is Molly Kinkaid, another of Christa's lawyers. Christa's team
has only two options left. First, a request for a
certificate of commutation, meaning a request that her sentence be
reduced from death to life in prison, that is currently
before the Tennessee Supreme Court. The court is considering several
(04:38):
arguments already made in Christa's numerous appeals, but also that
nearly two hundred females in Tennessee convicted of first degree
murder receive life sentences, yet Christa, a traumatized, mentally ill teen,
received death, a sentence no female teen has received in
the US in the modern era. Second option, their Hail Mary,
(05:02):
is for clemency, essentially a plead to Governor Bill Lee
to show mercy on Christa's life. That's what her team
is currently focused on. One of the key arguments relates
to a two thousand and five US Supreme Court decision
that set a national standard that individuals under the age
(05:22):
of eighteen could not be executed for their crimes. Krista
was eighteen at the time she killed Colleen, so the
decision doesn't free her from death row, but her legal
team thinks maybe it could get a court or the
governor to start thinking differently about who she was at
the time of the murder and who she's become in
the decades, since.
Speaker 6 (05:44):
She's grown a lot in prison, and she's become a
person that perhaps she always was meant to be.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
I'm Beth Carris, and this is unrestorable Season two Proof
of Life, an original podcas asked from anonymous content and iHeartRadio.
So when it comes to that bright line of saying,
if you're this age, you can do this and or
(06:16):
you know you can't do that unless you're twenty one,
I mean, like, how old in Tennessee do you have
to be to drive a car?
Speaker 4 (06:23):
Sixteen? Vote eighteen, drink twenty.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
One, get married without parental permission.
Speaker 4 (06:29):
I have no idea about eighteen.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
I believe it's eighteen.
Speaker 4 (06:34):
Die for your country, Oh eighteen, yeah, but rent a
car twenty five?
Speaker 5 (06:39):
Yes?
Speaker 4 (06:39):
Yeah, because we don't trust them to drive a car,
and we shouldn't.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
The idea of youth and diminished responsibility that teenagers simply
aren't capable of handling certain things is already well baked
into our system. But the US Supreme Court's decision Robri v.
Simmons in two thousand and five was a clear line
in the sand. The execution of juveniles those under eighteen
(07:05):
at the time of their crime violated the eighth and
fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution, the prohibition on cruel and
Unusual punishment, and the right to do process in equal
protection under the law. Just as Anthony Kennedy, writing for
a five to four majority decision, stated that quote society
views juveniles as categorically less culpable end quote than other defendants,
(07:30):
he also concluded that quote when a juvenile offender commits
a heinous crime, the state can exact forfeiture of some
of the most basic liberties, but the state cannot extinguish
his life and his potential to attain a mature understanding
of his own humanity end quote. The implication was clear,
Those who committed even heinous crimes at an early age
(07:52):
must be given the opportunity to change.
Speaker 4 (07:56):
It's not that they're broken if they get better, and
we know they get better, but there's a diminished sense
of consequence.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
And that is the case for everything young people do,
whether they're shoplifting or robbing someone or murdering.
Speaker 4 (08:11):
Tattoos or whatever like, there's no sense of what's in
the future.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
In his opinion, just as Kennedy acknowledged the arbitrariness of
imposing a line between seventeen and eighteen, the idea that
a few months or even a single day might be
the difference between life and death, Christa is the youngest
(08:39):
woman sentenced to death in the US in the modern era,
and that arbitrariness seems particularly stark in her case. Her
boyfriend to Daryl and Christa killed calling together. But to
Daryl is a year younger than Krista, so he was
sentenced to life in prison and will be eligible for
parole later this year.
Speaker 7 (09:00):
Knowing what we know about adolescent brain development, and there's
no distinction between a seventeen year old and an eighteen year.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
Old, this is Kelly Gleeson, one of Christa's attorneys.
Speaker 7 (09:11):
Then why should the State of Tennessee proceed with killing
an eighteen year old.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
It's not normal to kill people, and it requires a
set of circumstances to place into some kind of context,
and those circumstances have to include our brain and how
it functions.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
This is doctor Cecil Reynolds, emeritus Professor of Educational Psychology
and Professor of Neuroscience at Texas A and M University.
He's often called as an expert in cases involving youth
and the death penalty, and he says that adult and
adolescent brains are very different.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
The frontal regions can control what the limbic system is
telling us to do and can modulate that behavior, and
unfortunately those brain systems don't develop at the same time.
They don't mature at the same time. Your limbic system
(10:16):
matures years before your frontal systems do.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
The limbic system dictates basic survival instincts, sometimes causing us
to lash out, while the frontal lobes manage self control.
What that means is that the parts of the brain
we rely on to rein in our most volatile and
least rational behavior simply haven't fully matured by the time
we hit eighteen.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
The limbic system often wins that that battle or control.
So that's the fundamental basis of what some people will
refer to as the team brain Disconnected. It's not really
a disconnect. The connection's just not there yet in a
mature way that allows the system to function as it's
(11:06):
designed to function, because it's still developing, and there's a
lot of debate over when that maturation occurs, but there's
no debate that it's after twenty one.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Doctor Reynolds says that all of this means that a
teenager or anyone younger than twenty one, is more prone
to impulsivity and poor decision making, less capable of meaningfully
considering not just consequences but the overarching morality of any action.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
They're just highly reactive. What's best for me in this nanosecond?
What do I need to do to get away? I
don't know how many times I've had a defendant tell
me when I asked, why did you kill them? I
didn't know anything else to do. And you particular hear
(12:00):
that the younger of the defendant, So that speaks volumes
as well. So the brain processes involved in that moment
of hot cognition and their inability to find alternative behaviors,
alternative ways of acting that wouldn't put them on death road.
(12:24):
And by the way, the prospect of being caught in
charge with capital murder has zero to do with their
decision making. It doesn't deter a nineteen year old at all.
These are not carefully planned crimes where they set out
to kill somebody.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
The answer to grappling with diminished responsibility, says doctor Reynolds,
is by diminishing the consequences that people who commit their
crimes at eighteen, nineteen, and even twenty should not be
held to the same standards as fully mature adults.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
Raising the age of eligibility for death from seventeen to
eighteen was steeped in science. So what we're trying to
do now is put the science that we have back
in front of the court system and legislatures and say
there's good scientific reason to raise this age of eligibility
(13:24):
for death as a penalty from eighteen to twenty one.
We're going to have proper development of those communication fibers.
That's going to happen, which is another reason why people change.
Not only can they change, they are going to change,
take some people longer than others.
Speaker 5 (13:46):
And what do we do now that we didn't know
when Krista was sentenced to death.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
Huge changes into science of brain function and our ability
to image brain is so much better now than it
was third years ago. You can appeal a guilt verdict
on the basis of new science that would be persuasive
to a jury, that would demonstrate reasonable doubt or actual innocence.
(14:13):
But you can't get a new penalty here daring on
the basis of new science. And why shouldn't a jury
hear that before she's executed.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
I feel old in so many ways, and still stuck
at eighteen in so many ways because I grew in
a concrete boxes here. I've been in solitary confinement for
thirty years, living in a room by myself. I just
turned forty nine, and I feel way older than that
in so many ways.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
It's hard to compare Christa's life over the last thirty
years to anything familiar. So many of our common milestones,
going to college, finding a job, getting married, having kids,
finding a home, even worrying if you filed your taxes right,
they never happened to Krista. Instead, those years have been
spent in a concrete cell with one plexiglass window. Krista
(15:14):
has managed to carve out a life for herself inside
the debrak K Johnson Rehabilitation Center, but it's been a
long road, just.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
Being able to wake up in the morning and want
to be awake, want to be alive, not having to
struggle to communicate with people, not feeling as it's like
when you're about polar and you're awake for days, you
feel like it really is an illness.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
Christa's life improved significantly when she was finally properly diagnosed
with bipolar disorder and PTSD in her mid twenties.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
It's like you're walking around with no skin, your nerves
are raw, you're physically in pain, you're mentally in pain.
It's horrible and there's no really from it. So everything
is a noxious stimuli that comes at you from every direction.
And so to just be able to walk around and
(16:12):
be normal and have normal conversations, normal interactions, eat normally,
sweet normally, and just live as a normal human being
is amazing.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
As a death row inmate, Krista is not eligible for
formal rehabilitation programs, but she has had access to therapy.
Speaker 8 (16:33):
When you have people who have been incarcerated for a
long time, they kind of experience burnout of their own.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
Ali Winters is a social worker who started working with
Krista in twenty twelve. At the time, Krista was medicated
and stable, but she was frustrated with the turnover and
mental health professionals in the prison.
Speaker 8 (16:53):
Like, I'm so tired of telling my story over and
over and over again, answering the same questions over and
over and over again, simply because I now have a
new therapist and over time there's a level of resistance.
Speaker 5 (17:12):
One of the things that really occurred to me when
I was reading through the reams of mitigation in Christa's case,
very very very revealing personal details. You know of the
worst moments in Christa's life, so you know, everyone now
knows who she was molested by, everyone knows about her
being raped. It's in the public record. Every aspect of
(17:35):
your life becomes fodder for this system.
Speaker 8 (17:37):
Yeah, yeah, And I think maybe this is why Christa
engaged in the therapeutic process so much. She got to
dictate what she needed from me, and that's exactly what
she got.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
To gain back a small sice of control exactly.
Speaker 9 (18:00):
Chris has been held in solitary confinement longer than I've
been alive. I don't know how to wrap my head
around that. I think it's a despicable thing to do.
To anybody.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
This is Anna sent an investigator who works with Christa's
legal team, mostly tracking down mitigation evidence.
Speaker 9 (18:15):
Even if you consider those on death row the worst
of the worst, to torture somebody like that, it's inhumane.
So Christa, in spite of the environment she's been in,
has chosen to be a compassionate person. Like she should
have evolved into just psychosis and she should be completely
detached from reality. She is not. Christa is a person
(18:37):
who builds relationships with people, who has intellectual interests, who
cares about others, who has a life, and that is
against the odds of an incredibly painful and dehumanizing life
that she lives. So I think if you look at
Christa in the context of that, and say thirty years
after this crime, Chris is somebody who shows remorse who
(18:58):
other people who are incarcated with her, they describe her
as a light on the unit, somebody who booies everybody
else's emotions. She doesn't get to see people face to face.
What Christa does is she talks to people through the events.
She encourages them when people get on the unit. I'm
gonna cry because Chris is a remarkable person. When people
come and they don't have support, she sends them food,
(19:21):
she sends them hygiene products. It is incredible to see
somebody who has been through so much, who has been
ostracized and made out to be entreated like a monster.
To see somebody with that history, with that narrative, in
these conditions who chooses to give things, not because she
receives anything. She isn't getting things from the women who
(19:47):
she gives food and hygiene products to. She doesn't get
things from the other people that she chooses to be
compassionate towards. She does that because that's who she is.
So if you're thinking about Krista and her progression as
the person I think we see now is the person
that could have been thirty years ago had she received
the right supports.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
We heard over and over from the people closest to
Christa that she has become a loving, caring, generous person
who has worked very hard to create some kind of
better life for herself, even though confined to a prison cell.
But does that make what she did forgivable enough to
overturn her death sentence. That is a question now for
(20:30):
the Tennessee Supreme Court or the governor.
Speaker 10 (20:34):
The anger that people feel when they hear about violent
crime is just this instinctive revulsion and disgust, and they
want to hit back. It's like, you know, being hit
by somebody on the playground as a kid. Your first
reaction is you want to hit him right back.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
Sandra Babcock, a law professor at Cornell University and an
expert on women in the death penalty, says that part
of the sticking power of a death sentence is that
we gravitate towards the simplicity of retribution, and that's.
Speaker 10 (21:07):
The challenge I think with people who know how the
death penalty is applied in practice, and they know that
it doesn't deter, they know the social science data, and
they also know that it doesn't protect, it doesn't make
people safer, and it's also bad penal policy. But those
(21:27):
kinds of rational arguments don't land with people emotionally. When
they hear about violent crime. They just want to punish
because it makes them feel like that person is getting
their just desserts. Executing ten more people in the year
(21:49):
that Christa was arrested for her crime would not have
stopped that crime. What would have stopped that crime is
if the state has invested in child protection services that
were thoughtful and that were attentive, and that were focused
(22:10):
on providing meaningful support to families that needed it, that
were able to pick up on the red flags that
were present in Christa's case, Like that's what could have
stopped that crime. But it's so much more complicated, right
than that very clean, Like she was just evil and
(22:31):
because she's evil, the only way that we can put
an end to this is just by killing her.
Speaker 5 (22:37):
To look at a case like Christa's and say, well, fundamentally,
maybe there are there's no villain. That doesn't mean that
somebody you know didn't do something absolutely horrific, But this
isn't a battle between good and evil.
Speaker 10 (22:52):
One of the things that I find oddly uplifting about
doing death penalty work is the not knowledge that there
are no evil people in the world. Like you grow
up thinking that there are evil people. It's what we're
told by movies and TV shows and the media, and
(23:13):
we grow up terrified of these evil people that are
out there. And if there's nothing else that I've learned
in the nearly thirty five years that I've been defending
people on death row, it is that there are no
evil people. There are people who do evil things, but
those people are deeply human, They are deeply flawed, and
(23:37):
they are very damaged. That is the story of violent
crime that nobody is telling.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
Sandra says that the clemency process, the official mechanism for
requesting mercy for someone on death row and decided by
the governor, is.
Speaker 10 (23:58):
Brokenriginally, clemency was an act of grace. Clemency was a
fail safe. It wasn't designed to prevent innocent people from
being executed, because those people should be pardoned, they should
not be in prison at all. It was designed as
a way of recognizing people who had either turned themselves
(24:21):
around or had something that called out for an act
of grace and mercy. Clemency as it is currently practiced
in most states has lost that original purpose. It is
now seen as something that is only available for people
(24:42):
who are typically possibly innocent, and that is simply not
its function. So there is no fail safe. There is
no way that the legal system has sort of built
in a way of taking account of redemption and rehabilitation.
(25:03):
And that's one way in which our current prison system
has gotten so far removed from its original purpose. Right
its original purpose Departments of Corrections was to get people
ready to re enter society. You know, implicit in the
name Department of Corrections is that people can be corrected,
that people can change, and we have lost that.
Speaker 5 (25:26):
Why do you think we've lost that?
Speaker 10 (25:29):
I think partly it's politics. Politicians feel that they are
going to be punished for exercising mercy. I think that
they see it as a sign of weakness rather than
a sign of strength. And it's also due to these
(25:49):
narratives that we tell about people. The United States is
such a punitive country. It always has been, and I
think that tendency is only getting worse.
Speaker 11 (26:07):
I think we have a myth about our justice system
that comes through the news and popular media.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
This is Steve Ferrell, one of Christa's lawyers.
Speaker 11 (26:18):
But I think that there's something about how doing this
fixes problems and that victims are made whole once someone
has been the victim. However, in a murder, rape, even robbery,
so it changes the victim and the victim will never
be whole. And we've developed a myth about our super
(26:44):
effective justice system that it does make people whole and
it can't.
Speaker 2 (26:51):
At the heart of the retribution narrative, is the idea
that the balancing of the scales is possible. When we
talk about Christa spending twenty three hours a day in
a cell, others point out that Colleen doesn't even have that,
That Kristom might demonstrate some kind of generosity to her
fellow inmates, but Colleen never got the chance to show
the world how generous she could be. That Christa robbed
(27:14):
Colleen and Colleen's family of everything, and the only way
to make things right is to take everything from Christa,
including her life.
Speaker 11 (27:24):
When we talk about justice, I think we ignore that
real justice is impossible on certain things, and that real
fairness will never be achieved in any way.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
Perceptions of injustice and isolation have cultivated what seems like
unique devotion on the parts of Christal's lawyers as they
try to save her life. But death row lawyers often
develop close relationships with their clients in part because there's
some of the few people exposed to their client's humanity
in the context of a wildly dehumanizing situation.
Speaker 7 (28:02):
I see you as a human being. I see what
you've alleged to have done, and if you did it,
you know I don't. That doesn't matter to me. I
still care about you, and I will fight for you
and we will get the best outcome possible. And it's
very rewarding to me because it's asking people to trust
to reveal the darkest, hardest secrets, the scratches on their heart.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
That's next time on Proof of Life.
Speaker 5 (28:32):
Unrestorable is executive produced and hosted by Me, Sarah Tchulevin,
and Beth Carris, Mixing and sound design by Rezadiya for
Anonymous Content. Jessica Grimshaw is our executive producer, Jennifer Sears
is our executive in charge of production, and Nicole Pronk
is our legal counsel for iHeart executive producer Christina Everett
(28:54):
and supervising producer Abu Zaphar
Hosts And Creators
Beth Karas
Sarah Treleaven
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