Supreme Court clears Tennessee to execute Christa Pike after halting eleventh-hour appeal
The execution of death row inmate Christa Pike is set to move forward after the United States Supreme Court dissolved a temporary eleventh-hour stay, clearing the state of Tennessee to carry out the sentence.
The high court's intervention overturned an emergency ruling granted hours earlier by the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which had temporarily paused the lethal injection just as prison officials were finalizing execution preparations at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.
The 6th Circuit had initially granted a brief reprieve to weigh legal petitions asserting that sentencing juries had failed to adequately account for severe childhood physical and sexual abuse, brain trauma, and Pike’s young age at the time of the crime.
However, the Supreme Court vacated that injunction, clearing the final legal obstacle standing between the state and the execution chamber.
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Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh granted the application to vacate the stay of the execution. No explanation for lifting the stay was provided in the order.
The top court's three liberal justices - Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson - dissented in Wednesday evening's order.
Sotomayor specifically wrote that she dissents because the decision cleared the way for Tennessee to execute Pike before her pending legal challenges to her conviction "can be properly considered", reports The BBC.
"Tennessee's desire to expedite Pike's execution by a few days or even weeks cannot outweigh her 'fundamental interest in [her] own life," she said.
Pike, 50, is poised to become the first woman put to death in Tennessee in more than two centuries, and the 19th woman executed nationwide since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976.
She was condemned to death in 1996 for the murder of 19-year-old Job Corps classmate Colleen Slemmer. Pike, who was 18 at the time, lured Slemmer to an isolated woodland area on the University of Tennessee campus alongside co-defendants Tadaryl Shipp and Shadolla Peterson. Over the course of nearly an hour, Slemmer was beaten, slashed, and tortured, with Pike ultimately crushing her skull with a piece of asphalt. Pike kept a fragment of the victim's skull as a trophy, later showing it to classmates.
Shipp, who was 17 at the time, was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole, while Peterson received probation after agreeing to testify against Pike.
In recent days, Pike’s defense attorneys lodged multiple appeals spanning clemency requests, state protocol challenges, and constitutional claims regarding her mental health, arguing that modern neuroscience and state juvenile sentencing reforms should spare her life. Tennessee Governor Bill Lee rejected an executive clemency petition, maintaining that the death sentence remained lawful and appropriate.
Barring any unforeseen developments, prison authorities are proceeding under state execution protocol.
Pike will be strapped to the gurney inside Riverbend’s execution chamber, where the state will administer a lethal injection sequence while official witnesses and surviving members of Colleen Slemmer’s family observe from the adjoining gallery.
Phoebe Tonks