A federal appeals court on Wednesday issued a temporary stay halting the scheduled execution of Christa Pike less than two hours before she was due to receive a lethal injection in Tennessee, intervening in what would have been the state’s first execution of a woman in more than 200 years.
The 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals granted what it described as a “short stay of execution” while judges review Pike’s claim that evidence of childhood sexual abuse was not properly considered at sentencing.
Tennessee officials immediately asked the US Supreme Court to lift the stay and allow the execution to proceed at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.
Pike, 50, was convicted of first-degree murder for the 1995 torture and killing of 19-year-old classmate Colleen Slemmer at a Knoxville vocational centre. Pike was 18 at the time; her then-boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp, 17, and another teenager were also involved. Shipp received a life sentence with the possibility of parole.
Her lawyers have argued that Pike endured violence, neglect and sexual abuse as a child, including rapes at ages 11 and 17, and later received diagnoses of bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. They sought to have her death sentence reduced to life without parole. Tennessee Governor Bill Lee rejected the clemency petition. Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, has publicly supported carrying out the sentence.
A group of United Nations human rights experts has also called for the death sentence to be commuted.
Women have accounted for only 18 of the 1,683 executions carried out in the United States since capital punishment resumed in 1976. If the execution ultimately goes ahead, Pike would be the only person put to death in Tennessee’s modern death-penalty era for a crime committed as a teenager.
