A federal appeals court on Wednesday halted Tennessee’s execution of Christa Pike an hour before it was scheduled to take place, according to The Associated Press.
The court said it wanted to take time to review whether Pike’s allegations of sexual abuse and rape as a child were considered before she was sentenced to death in the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer.
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Pike committed the murder when she was 18, making her one of the youngest women sent to death row, according to The AP. Her execution would’ve been Tennessee’s first execution of a woman in more than 200 years.
It was not immediately known whether Tennessee’s attorney general would appeal the decision or how long the execution might be delayed.
Push to stop execution
Since Pike’s conviction, her attorneys have pointed to evidence of her past childhood abuse, sexual assault and mental illness, arguing the jury didn’t hear the full extent of her history.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee denied her clemency request on Monday. The following day, the Supreme Court denied Pike’s attorneys’ request to stop the execution. Her lawyers had argued to the justices that the restraints on the gurney used for lethal injection would cause “severe mental suffering and superadded psychological terror under Tennessee’s lethal injection protocol.”
On Monday, state prosecutors acknowledged Pike suffered abuse but cited a judge’s conclusion from August that it’s “speculative whether Pike would suffer” greater mental harm from the lethal injection protocol.
The victim’s mother, May Martinez, said she wants the execution to go forward, according to The AP.
“Every time I think about it, I think about Colleen feeling that pain and trying to get up and run,” she said in a phone interview with the outlet.
On Jan. 12, 1995, in Knoxville, Tennessee, Pike, along with her boyfriend 17-year-old Tadaryl Shipp and 18-year-old Shadolla Peterson, lured Slemmer into the woods after she became convinced Slemmer was trying to steal her boyfriend. When they got there, Pike cut Slemmer with a box cutter and beat her with a large piece of asphalt. Shipp admitted to carving a pentagram into Slemmer, a symbol associated with Satanism.
Both Pike and Shipp admitted to the murder, but only Pike was sentenced to death. Peterson agreed to testify against the other two and received probation for pleading to a lesser crime. Shipp received a life sentence with the possibility of parole.
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