Christa Pike’s execution, the first involving a woman in 200 years in Tennessee, is in limbo after it was halted by a federal appeals court an hour before she was set to be put to death.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit approved a last-minute request for a stay of execution for Pike, the only woman on Tennessee’s death row, to give judges time to review whether her allegations of sexual abuse and rape as a child were fully considered before she was sentenced to death.
“The court has stayed this, recognizing the serious concerns about Christa’s scheduled execution,” her attorney said. Pike’s execution is now paused until the court issues another order.
It wasn’t immediately clear how long it would take the judges to issue a decision. Execution witnesses had already gathered at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville when the stay came down at around 9 a.m. CDT, an hour before her scheduled execution time.
Christa Pike’s death sentence
Pike, now 50, was sentenced to death for killing a fellow student in a 1995 murder that she committed at age 18. Pike and her boyfriend were both convicted of stabbing and beating 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, their classmate at a job training facility in Knoxville.
The case drew a lot of attention because a pentagram was carved on Slemmer’s body and other elements of the crime fueled fears of Satan worship during the “satanic panic” of the 1980s and 1990s.
Pike feared Slemmer was trying to steal her boyfriend and lured her to a wooded area on Jan. 12, 1995, prosecutors said. She slashed Slemmer with a box cutter and beat her with a large chunk of asphalt.
Tadaryl Shipp, Pike’s boyfriend, admitted that he was the one who carved the pentagram, a star-shaped symbol associated with Satanism, into Slemmer’s body. Shipp was 17 at the time of the crime and received a sentence of life in prison with the possibility of parole. Pike was the only one sentenced to death.
As her execution got closer, it sparked renewed debate over the death penalty for young offenders.
Pike doesn’t deny that she committed the murder but her supporters argue the state should consider Pike’s age at the time, mental illness and a history of severe sexual abuse, including being raped from the time she was a toddler. Assistant Federal Defender Stephen Ferrell pointed out that Pike’s death sentence is an outlier because other 18-year-olds sentenced to death in Tennessee had their sentences vacated.
The U.S. Supreme Court denied a request from Pike’s attorneys on Tuesday to halt the execution and Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee denied her clemency.
“I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid. It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I’d done,” Pike wrote 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.”
The victim’s mother called for the execution to go forward, saying she’s 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.
A group helped raise money so she and her husband could travel from Florida to witness the execution.
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 U.S. Since 1976, 18 women have been put to death in the country, representing about 1 per cent 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 U.S. In 2021, the federal government executed Lisa Montgomery, marking the first time in nearly seven decades that the U.S. government put a female inmate to death.
