Appeals court halts execution of Tennessee woman less than two hours before lethal injection

Tennessee's execution of Christa Pike for a murder she committed at 18 years old was halted Wednesday about an hour before it was set to begin, as a federal appeals court sought to review whether her allegations of childhood sexual abuse and rape were fully considered at her sentencing.

The Tennessee attorney general's office immediately asked the US Supreme Court to vacate the ‌stay order.

This would have been the state’s first execution of a woman in at least 200 years. 

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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 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 1990s. 

Execution witnesses had already gathered at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville when the order came down at around 9am CDT.

As the execution date drew near, it renewed debate over the death penalty for young offenders.

Pike does not deny committing the killing, but her supporters argue the state should consider Pike’s age at the time, mental illness and a history of severe sexual abuse that included being raped from the time she was a toddler. 

Her lawyers also pointed to evidence that Pike's mother drank heavily during pregnancy, contributing to ​faulty brain development that made it difficult for their client to control her impulses as a young person.

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. 

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The US Supreme Court on Tuesday denied a request from Pike's attorneys to halt the execution. Governor of Tennessee Bill Lee on Monday denied Pike clemency.

“I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid. It took me numerous years to even realise 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.”

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.

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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 January 12, 1995. Pike cut Slemmer with a box cutter and beat her with a large chunk of asphalt. 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.

Their co-defendant, Shadolla Peterson, who was 18 years old at the time of the murder and had acted as a lookout for the other two, appeared as a witness for the prosecution and received probation.

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 US. Since 1976, 18 women have been put to death in the country, representing about 1 percent of all executions, according to the center.

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

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