Christa Pike was supposed to die yesterday. The 50-year-old Tennessee woman’s execution for a murder she committed at age 18 was set for Wednesday morning, and would have made her the first woman executed in the state in 200 years.
In the last moments before she was taken from her cell there was a flurry of dramatic legal activity. First, an appeals court stayed the execution just an hour before it was due to start. Then, hours later, the US Supreme Court stepped in to overturn that stay. And so Pike was taken to face what she assumed would be her death at the hands of a squad of all-female executioners.
