After last-minute stay, U.S. Supreme Court says Tennessee can execute Christa Pike

Christa Pike is shown on Jan. 12, 2023, in this photo provided by the Tennessee Department of Correction. (Tennessee Department of Correction)Social SharingThe U.S. Supreme Court is allowing the execution of Christa Gail Pike to go forward, overturning a last-minute stay on Wednesday that was issued by an appeals court hours earlier.

Pike was scheduled to die by lethal injection in the morning, and witnesses had already gathered at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville when the 6th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals voted 2-1 to issue a stay. That court said a delay was needed to consider whether Pike's allegations of childhood sexual abuse were fully considered at her sentencing.

Pike, now 50, and her boyfriend were convicted of stabbing and beating 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, their classmate at a job training facility, in Knoxville in 1995.

The Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals halted Pike's execution on a 2-1 vote about an hour before the scheduled execution time, as witnesses and others gathered at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.

The case garnered widespread attention at the time in part because a pentagram that was carved on Slemmer's body and other elements of the crime stoked fears of Satan worship during the "satanic panic" of the 1980s and '90s.

Tennessee's attorney general immediately appealed the stay to the U.S. Supreme Court. Witnesses and media remained at the prison while the high court considered whether to allow the execution to proceed.

The state's execution order expires at midnight, said Kelley Henry, a Nashville-based lawyer experienced with Tennessee death penalty law. If time runs out and the stay is lifted, the Tennessee Supreme Court would need to set a new execution date.

In its appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, the attorney general's office wrote that halting the execution at the last moment traumatized Slemmer's family and rewarded "abusive delay tactics" by Pike's lawyers.

People gather during a protest against the death penalty at the Tennessee State Capitol on Sunday in Nashville. (George Walker IV/The Associated Press)Pike does not deny committing the killing, but her supporters have argued the state should consider her age at the time, mental illness and a history of severe sexual abuse that included being raped from the time she was a toddler.

"It is inconceivable that in the 21st century, the criminal justice system is poised to execute a survivor of rape and child sexual abuse whose jury never had the opportunity to consider those facts in weighing the defendant's moral culpability," her lawyers wrote in a filing to the U.S. Supreme Court.

As the execution date drew near, it renewed debate over the death penalty for young offenders. Assistant Federal Defender Stephen Ferrell said Pike's death sentence is an outlier because other 18-year-olds sentenced to death in Tennessee have had their sentences vacated.

After the killing, Pike was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. In her clemency petition, she said she only wanted to fight Slemmer but killed her in a frenzied attack when she couldn't "put the brakes on."

"I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid. It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I'd done," Pike said in a statement included in her clemency petition.

"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."

In this image from video provided by WBIR-TV, Pike cries after being sentenced to death on March 30, 1996. (WBIR-TV/The Associated Press)Slemmer's mother wants the lethal injection to go forward, saying she has waited decades to see Pike's sentence carried out.

"Every time I think about it, I think about Colleen feeling that pain and trying to get up and run," May Martinez said in a telephone interview.

Martinez said a group helped raise money so she and her husband could travel from Florida to witness the execution. She didn't respond to a message on Wednesday after the execution was halted.

Martinez said her daughter's age also should matter in deciding Pike's fate.

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"Not a day goes by, or a minute goes by that I do not think about Colleen. Holidays are the worst," Martinez said, noting that her daughter would have turned 51 earlier in September.

The 1995 killing rocked the city of Knoxville. Prosecutors said Pike, fearing Slemmer was trying to steal her boyfriend, lured her to a wooded area on Jan. 12, 1995.

Pike cut Slemmer with a box cutter and beat her with a large chunk of asphalt. Tadaryl Shipp, Pike's boyfriend, has admitted that he was the one who carved a pentagram, a star-shaped symbol associated with Satanism, into her body.

Shipp was 17 when the crime happened and received a sentence of life in prison with the possibility of parole. Pike was the only one sentenced to death.

Tennessee has not executed a woman for at least 200 years, according to Robin M. Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. Older records can be spotty, though, so it's difficult to know precise details about the last woman who was put to death there.

It's a rarity across the U.S. Since 1976, 18 women have been put to death in the country, representing about one per cent of all executions, according to the centre.

Most recently, Missouri in 2023 executed Amber McLaughlin for a 2003 killing, in what is believed to be the first execution of a transgender woman in the U.S.

In 2021, the federal government executed Lisa Montgomery, marking the first time in nearly seven decades that the U.S. government put a female inmate to death.

Pike would be the 30th person executed in the U.S. this year after Florida carried out an execution on Tuesday.