Christa Pike Execution Halted at the Last Minute: Tennessee’s First Woman Execution in 200 Years Delayed

The Christa Pike execution — which would have made her the first woman put to death in Tennessee in more than 200 years — was halted at the last minute on Wednesday, September 30, when a federal appeals court issued a short stay as witnesses had already gathered at the prison, according to the Associated Press.

Pike, now 50, had been scheduled to die by lethal injection at 10 a.m. CDT at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. But around 9 a.m. local time, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ordered a brief stay to “properly analyze the parties’ fully briefed arguments and resolve the issues on the merits,” wrote Circuit Judge Jane Stranch in the majority order, joined by Judge Karen Nelson Moore. Circuit Judge Richard Griffin dissented, calling Pike’s filing “another last-ditch meritless effort to delay a lawful execution.”

It was not immediately clear when the Sixth Circuit would rule on the underlying motion. The last-minute reprieve came just hours after the U.S. Supreme Court denied Pike’s request for a stay on Tuesday evening, and two days after Tennessee Governor Bill Lee denied her clemency petition on Monday.

The 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer

Pike was 18 in January 1995 when she, her 17-year-old boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp, and a third companion lured 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer — a classmate at their Knoxville Job Corps vocational training center — into a wooded area on the University of Tennessee’s agricultural campus, where they tortured and killed her.

The grisly nature of the slaying drew intense national media coverage: the perpetrators carved the shape of a pentagram into the victim’s chest and took a chunk of her skull as a souvenir of the killing. Shipp later admitted to carving the symbol. Trial testimony indicated Pike viewed Slemmer as a rival for Shipp’s affections — a claim people who knew Slemmer denied, saying she was not interested in him.

Pike and Shipp both confessed and were convicted of first-degree murder in 1996. Pike was sentenced to death on March 30, 1996; Shipp, who was 17 at the time of the crime, received life in prison with the possibility of parole. Their co-defendant Shadolla Peterson, 18, acted as a lookout, testified for the prosecution, and received probation. Pike is currently the only woman on Tennessee’s death row.

Clemency denied, Supreme Court rejects stay

Pike’s clemency petition asked Governor Bill Lee to commute her death sentence to life in prison without parole, citing childhood trauma and sexual abuse, mental-health history, her age at the time of the offense, and fetal-alcohol-related brain damage her lawyers attributed to her mother’s heavy drinking during pregnancy.

“I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid. It took me numerous years to even realise the gravity of what I’d done,” Pike said in a statement included in the petition. “Even more to accept how many lives I affected. I took the life of someone’s child, sister and friend. It sickens me now to think I could commit such a crime.”

Lee declined to intervene on Monday, saying he would uphold the state’s sentence “after deliberate consideration” — keeping the Christa Pike execution on schedule. Before the decision, Pike wrote in a letter: “Whether my clemency is granted or not, I am at peace. I am not afraid to die. I’m only nervous about the process.”

Her legal team then filed a petition for a writ of certiorari and a stay application with the U.S. Supreme Court on September 25. The Court denied both on September 29.

What makes the Christa Pike execution historic

If the Christa Pike execution is carried out, Pike would be the first woman Tennessee has executed in at least 200 years. She would also be the only person executed in the state’s modern capital-punishment era for a crime committed as a teenager — Pike was 18 years and a few months old at the time of the killing.

Pike has now spent 30 years on death row awaiting the Christa Pike execution. She was also convicted in August 2001 of attempted first-degree murder for an assault on another inmate, according to the Tennessee Department of Correction.

Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, has waited decades for the Christa Pike execution to be carried out and traveled from Florida to witness it. “I’m very happy because she’ll never kill anyone else. Plus I want Colleen to be at rest without having constant reminders,” she told reporters this week, adding that Pike “has never reached out to me, and she is not remorseful at all.”

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