The US Supreme Court has lifted a last-minute stay of execution for Tennessee death row inmate Christa Pike, clearing the path for her to become the first woman put to death in the state in two centuries.
Pike, 50, had been scheduled to die by lethal injection at 10 a.m. Wednesday, but judges from the Sixth Circuit Appeals court halted the proceedings hours earlier. The appellate panel paused the execution “until further order of this court,” stating that “the interests of justice and the finality of Pike’s impending execution compel the entry of a short stay of execution in order to properly analyse the parties’ fully briefed arguments and resolve the issues on the merits.”
Pike’s legal team welcomed the temporary reprieve. “The court has stayed this recognising the serious concerns about Christa’s scheduled execution,” her attorney said in a statement.
Those concerns stemmed from arguments her lawyers have pressed throughout her three decades of incarceration. Assistant Federal Defender Stephen Ferrell has said Pike was abused as a child and was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. Her attorneys have maintained she should have received life in prison rather than death, citing her age at the time of the crime, her childhood trauma and her mental health conditions as mitigating factors.
Tennessee’s attorney general moved swiftly to challenge the appellate stay, filing a request with the Supreme Court to overrule the lower court’s order. Justice Brett Kavanaugh granted the application to vacate the stay, though the order provided no additional reasoning for the decision.
It was not immediately clear when the execution would proceed following the Supreme Court’s intervention.
Pike has spent 30 years on death row after being sentenced to death at age 20 for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. On January 12, 1995, Pike — then 18 — lured Slemmer to a secluded woodland area in Knoxville with her then-boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp and friend Shadolla Peterson. According to court documents, Pike and Shipp attacked Slemmer for approximately 30 minutes while Peterson kept watch, carving a pentagram into the victim’s chest before Pike delivered a fatal blow to Slemmer’s head.
In a letter shared just ahead of her planned execution, Pike addressed her fate directly. “Whether my clemency is granted or not, I am at peace,” she wrote.
Her clemency petition offered a stark self-assessment of the crime that has defined her adult life. “I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid. It took me numerous years to even realise the gravity of what I’d done. Even more to accept how many lives I affected. I took the life of someone’s child, sister, friend. It sickens me now to think I had the ability to commit such a crime,” Pike wrote.
The Tennessee Department of Corrections confirmed that Pike had declined her final meal prior to the scheduled execution.