The United States Supreme Court has cleared the path for Tennessee to execute Christa Pike, vacating a last-minute stay that had halted what would be the state’s first execution of a woman in at least two centuries.
Pike, 50, was originally scheduled to die by lethal injection on Wednesday morning for a murder committed when she was 18. Witnesses had already assembled at Nashville’s Riverbend Maximum Security Institution when the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a 2-1 stay to review whether allegations of childhood sexual abuse were adequately considered during her sentencing.
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority issued the order without explanation. The three liberal justices dissented, arguing that Pike’s claims warranted further judicial scrutiny. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the decision interfered with the 6th Circuit’s deliberative process and “unnecessarily prevents that court from giving due consideration to Pike’s claim.”
Following the high court’s action, the Tennessee Department of Correction confirmed it would proceed with the execution Wednesday night before the state’s death warrant expired at midnight.
Pike and her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, were convicted of the 1995 torture and killing of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a fellow student at a Knoxville job-training center. Shipp, who was 17 at the time, received a life sentence with the possibility of parole; Pike was the sole defendant sentenced to death.
Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti had immediately appealed the stay, arguing that the last-minute halt traumatized Slemmer’s family and rewarded “abusive delay tactics” by Pike’s legal team.
Pike does not dispute her role in the killing. However, her attorneys contend that her jury never heard critical mitigating evidence: that she suffered severe sexual abuse from toddlerhood, was diagnosed after the crime with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, and was a mentally ill teenager at the time of the offense.
“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 court filing.
In a clemency petition, Pike described the attack as a frenzied episode during which she could not “put the brakes on.” She expressed deep remorse: “I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid. 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.”
Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, has advocated for the execution to proceed. “Every time I think about it, I think about Colleen feeling that pain and trying to get up and run,” she told The Associated Press in a recent interview.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, Tennessee has not executed a woman for at least 200 years, though historical records are incomplete. Since the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976, 18 women have been executed nationwide — approximately 1% of all executions.
