US Supreme Court clears way for Christa Gail Pike execution in Tennessee
The US Supreme Court overturned a last-minute stay and allowed Tennessee to proceed with executing Christa Gail Pike for a 1995 murder.
Supreme Court lifts stay, Tennessee execution of Pike to proceed
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that Tennessee may carry out the execution of Christa Gail Pike, overturning a stay issued by a federal appeals court just hours earlier, mprnews.org reports.
Pike, 50, was scheduled to die by lethal injection for the 1995 stabbing and beating of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a classmate at a job training facility in Knoxville. 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, citing the need to examine whether Pike's allegations of childhood sexual abuse had been fully considered during her sentencing.
Tennessee's attorney general immediately appealed the stay to the Supreme Court. The high court sided with the state, with the three liberal justices — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — dissenting. Sotomayor wrote that the ruling clears the way for the execution to happen "before her still-pending legal challenges to her conviction can be properly considered."
A Tennessee Department of Correction spokesperson confirmed that the execution would proceed Wednesday night. The state's execution order was set to expire at midnight, according to Nashville-based attorney Kelley Henry, who has extensive experience with Tennessee death penalty law.
The attorney general's office argued in its appeal that the last-minute halt had traumatised Slemmer's family and rewarded "abusive delay tactics" by Pike's legal team.
The 1995 killing
Pike was 18 when she and her then-boyfriend lured Slemmer to a wooded area on 12 January 1995. Prosecutors said Pike, fearing Slemmer was trying to steal her boyfriend, cut the victim with a box cutter and beat her with a large chunk of asphalt. Pike's boyfriend, Shipp, who was 17 at the time, has admitted to carving a pentagram into Slemmer's body — a detail that drew widespread attention and fuelled fears of Satan worship during the so-called "satanic panic" of the 1980s and 1990s.
Shipp received a sentence of life in prison with the possibility of parole. Pike was the only one sentenced to death.
Arguments for and against the execution
Pike does not deny committing the killing. Her supporters, however, argue the state should consider her age at the time, her diagnosed mental illnesses — bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder — and her allegations of severe childhood sexual abuse, including rape from toddlerhood.
"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 attorneys wrote in a court filing.
Assistant Federal Defender Stephen Ferrell said Pike's death sentence is an outlier, noting that other 18-year-olds in Tennessee have had similar sentences vacated.
In her clemency petition, Pike described the killing as a frenzied attack she could not stop. "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," she said in a statement.
Slemmer's mother, May Martinez, takes the opposite view. She told The Associated Press in a telephone interview on Saturday that she has waited decades to see the sentence carried out. "Every time I think about it, I think about Colleen feeling that pain and trying to get up and run," Martinez said. A support group helped pay for Martinez and her husband to travel from Florida to witness the execution. Martinez also noted that her daughter's age should factor into any judgment of Pike's fate — Slemmer would have turned 51 earlier in September.
Historical context
Tennessee has not executed a woman for at least 200 years, according to Robin M. Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, though she acknowledged that older records can be incomplete. Since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, 18 women have been executed, accounting for roughly 1 percent of all executions nationwide.
The most recent comparable cases include Missouri's 2023 execution of Amber McLaughlin for a 2003 killing — widely reported as the first execution of a transgender woman in the United States — and the 2021 federal execution of Lisa Montgomery, the first time in nearly seven decades that the federal government put a female inmate to death.
If the execution proceeds as planned, Pike would be the 30th person executed in the United States this year, one day after Florida carried out a separate execution on Tuesday.
Source: Google News MT — Crime (en)