The Supreme Court has dissolved a last-minute stay and cleared Tennessee to execute Christa Pike, the only woman on the state’s death row.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh granted the application to vacate the injunction on Wednesday evening, overturning an emergency ruling from the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that had paused the lethal injection just hours earlier. Prison officials at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville had already been finalizing execution preparations when the appeals court intervened.
The 6th Circuit had granted a brief reprieve to weigh legal petitions asserting that sentencing juries failed to adequately account of Pike’s severe childhood physical and sexual abuse, brain trauma, and her young age at the time of the crime.
However, the Supreme Court vacated that injunction without explanation, clearing the final legal obstacle standing between the state and the execution chamber. The court’s three liberal justices — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — dissented from the order.
“Tennessee’s desire to expedite Pike’s execution by a few days or even weeks cannot outweigh her ‘fundamental interest in [her] own life,'” Sotomayor wrote. She added that she dissented because the decision cleared the way for Tennessee to execute Pike before her pending legal challenges to her conviction “can be properly considered.”
Pike, 50, is now poised to become the first woman put to death in Tennessee in more than two centuries. She would be the 19th woman executed nationwide since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976.
In recent days, Pike’s defense attorneys lodged multiple appeals spanning clemency requests, state protocol challenges, and constitutional claims regarding her mental health. They argued that modern neuroscience and state juvenile sentencing reforms should spare her life. Tennessee Governor Bill Lee rejected an executive clemency petition, maintaining that the death sentence remained lawful and appropriate.
Barring any unforeseen developments, prison authorities are proceeding under state execution protocol. Pike will be strapped to the gurney inside Riverbend’s execution chamber, where the state will administer a lethal injection sequence while official witnesses and surviving members of Colleen Slemmer’s family observe from the adjoining gallery.
Pike was condemned to death in 1996 for the murder of 19-year-old Job Corps classmate Colleen Slemmer. Pike, who was 18 at the time, lured Slemmer to an isolated woodland area on the University of Tennessee campus alongside co-defendants Tadaryl Shipp and Shadolla Peterson. Over the course of nearly an hour, Slemmer was beaten, slashed, and tortured, with Pike ultimately crushing her skull with a piece of asphalt. Pike kept a fragment of the victim’s skull as a trophy, later showing it to classmates.
Shipp, who was 17 at the time, was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole, while Peterson received probation after agreeing to testify against Pike.
Tennessee has not yet announced an exact revised execution date for Pike.