A federal appeals court intervened Wednesday morning to stop Tennessee’s first execution of a woman in 200 years, granting a stay roughly one hour before Christa Pike was scheduled to die by lethal injection.
The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a 2-1 ruling pausing the 11 a.m. ET execution, 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 analyze the parties’ fully briefed arguments and resolve the issues on the merits.” The decision came after both Governor Bill Lee and the Tennessee Supreme Court declined to grant clemency.
Stephen Ferrell, Pike’s attorney, said the stay recognizes “serious concerns about Christa’s scheduled execution.” Meanwhile, Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti’s office vowed to continue advocating for the lawfully imposed sentence and petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to lift the stay, characterizing the defense’s motion as a common last-minute tactic in capital cases.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which opposed the execution, urged Governor Lee to respect the court’s decision and cancel the execution entirely.
Pike, now 50, was 18 when she and her then-boyfriend, 17-year-old Tadaryl Shipp, murdered 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a fellow student at the Knoxville Job Corps, in January 1995. Prosecutors said Pike believed Slemmer was trying to take Shipp away from her. The pair lured Slemmer to a wooded area near the University of Tennessee’s agriculture campus, where Pike cut Slemmer’s stomach and throat with a box cutter and bludgeoned her with a rock. Shipp carved a pentagram into the victim’s chest, and Pike later displayed a fragment of Slemmer’s skull to a friend.
The case drew national attention due to the perpetrators’ youth and the crime’s brutality. Shipp received a life sentence with the possibility of parole. Pike has never denied her role in the killing and was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.
“I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid,” Pike wrote in her clemency petition. “It took me numerous years to even realize 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.”
Colleen Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, told the Associated Press on Saturday she was awaiting the execution. “Every time I think about it, I think about Colleen feeling that pain and trying to get up and run,” Martinez said. “Not a day goes by, or a minute goes by that I do not think about Colleen. Holidays are the worst.”
The Associated Press contributed reporting
