Federal court halts execution of Christa Pike in 11th hour - USA Today
A federal appeals court has stayed the execution of Christa Pike less than two hours before it was set to be carried out, but the state is fighting to allow it to proceed.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit issued an order the morning of Sept. 30 staying Pike's execution "until further order of this court," citing new arguments relating to Pike's traumatic childhood, which was marked by years of sexual assaults starting before she was in pre-school.
"The interests of justice and the finality of Pike’s impending execution compel the entry of a short stay of execution in order to properly analyze the parties’ fully briefed arguments and resolve the issues on the merit," the court wrote in the order obtained by USA TODAY.
Pike's execution had been set for 10 a.m. ET on Wednesday, Sept. 30.
The Tennessee Attorney General's Office quickly filed an application in the U.S. Supreme Court to vacate the lower court's stay.
"The Sixth Circuit granted a stay − that Pike did not even request − without determining that Pike is likely to succeed on the merits," the state wrote, adding that Pike is unlikely to succeed because her last-minute court filings amount to arguments that already have been unsuccessful in previous court proceedings.
"As Colleen’s mother recently said, 'Thirty-one years is long enough,'" the state wrote. "The Court should vacate the stay of execution to avoid rewarding Pike’s abusive delay tactics, to prevent further trauma to Colleen’s family, and to protect Tennessee’s grave sovereign interest in the execution of its exhaustively reviewed judgment."
If Pike's execution does proceed, she would become the first woman put to death in the state in more than 200 years and only the third woman to be executed in the U.S. in the past decade. Pike, 50, was convicted of the prolonged and brutal 1995 murder of her romantic rival, 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer.
Pike's attorneys, women's advocacy groups, sex assault experts and Amnesty International have been vigorously fighting for her life in recent months. They presented a novel argument in the annals of death row: that Pike was so traumatized from years of sexual assault as a girl that her execution would cause her to relive those moments and experience an unconstitutional level of cruel and unusual punishment.
"She will relive the sounds, the smells, and the pain," wrote a dozen women's advocacy organizations in what's known as a friend-of-the court brief filed in the Tennessee Supreme Court on Sept. 10.
"She will feel it now as she did then. And it will be as horrific for her now as it was then," they wrote. "(We) have very little doubt that Christa Pike will go to her death believing and feeling that she is being raped yet again."
Prosecutors have acknowledged Pike's harrowing childhood but they maintain that her punishment fits the brutal crime.
"Pike’s prior abuse and mental struggles are tragic to say the least," the Attorney General's Office wrote in arguments to the Supreme Court this week. "But they are no cause to insulate her from a lawfully imposed and exhaustively reviewed death sentence that a jury of her peers imposed purely because of her own horrific conduct."
At every turn, courts and Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee rejected Pike's arguments, culminating in the Supreme Court declining to take up the case less than 24 hours before the execution. Until Wednesday, when the 6th Circuit intervened following late-night filings by Pike's attorneys.
Here's what you need to know about Pike's case.
The stay, issued in a 2-1 decision, pauses Pike’s execution until the court issues another order.
"To adequately address and resolve the issues now presented to this court and in carefully balancing the equities, we find that a stay of Pike’s execution is necessary,” wrote Judge Jane Branstetter Stranch, an Obama appointee. Concurring was Judge Karen Nelson Moore, a Clinton appointee. The dissenting judge, Richard Allen Griffin, is a George W. Bush appointee.
The issue before the court is whether to allow Pike to reopen a proceeding called a habeas petition.
Pike’s habeas proceedings ended years ago. The basis of her attorneys' argument to let her reopen those proceedings is the state's recent admission that Pike was sexually abused as a child, according to court filings.
"She states that the State recently reversed its litigation position that she is a liar who fabricated sexual abuse," the 6th Circuit panel wrote. "Pike contends that the State’s concession of her history of child sexual abuse and rape 'erodes the foundation' of her state court proceedings. Pike ties this erosion to defects in the federal court proceedings."
Pike's lawyers raised the issue with a federal judge in Eastern Tennessee, but that judge did not let her reopen the habeas proceedings.
On Jan. 12, 1995, 18-year-old Pike, her boyfriend, and another young woman lured Slemmer to the woods in Knoxville. Pike and her boyfriend, then-17-year-old Tadaryl Shipp, tortured and murdered Slemmer in a crime that made international headlines both for its brutality and because of Pike's gender and youth.
"Armed with a box cutter and meat cleaver, Pike and two accomplices lured Slemmer to an isolated area. There, Pike kneed Slemmer’s head, threw her to the ground, and repeatedly kicked her," the Tennessee Attorney General's Office wrote in court documents. "When Slemmer tried to flee, Pike sliced her stomach with the box cutter. ... As Slemmer begged for her life, Pike repeatedly kicked her in the face. Pike then cut Slemmer’s throat as she begged for mercy."
After Slemmer made one final attempt to escape, Pike smashed the back of her head with a rock, they wrote. Shipp also carved a pentagram into Slemmer's chest, and Pike later showed off a piece of Slemmer's skull to a friend.
Pike was sentenced to death and Shipp got a life sentence because at 17, he wasn't eligible for the death penalty.
For Slemmer's mother, May Martinez, Pike's execution more than 30 years after her daughter's murder would represent long-awaited justice.
"I just want Christa down so I can end it, relieve my daughter, so she finally can be resting," Martinez told WBIR-TV in 2021. "There's not a day goes by that I don't think about Colleen or how she died and how rough it was."
Martinez recently told WBIR-TV that she was planning to witness Pike's execution.
"I'll hold Colleen's picture up to remind her of what she did," Martinez told the station. "She never apologized − never even tried − or her family."
She said she remembers her daughter as a playful and compassionate young woman who loved roller skating, computers, and playing old games with her family. She laments that Pike so overshadowed her daughter over the years.
"It's never about the victims," she said. "It's like Colleen was never there."
Like the other 44 women on death row in the U.S., Pike has experienced conditions that advocates say is more unfair and undignified compared to their male counterparts, a USA TODAY investigation found in June.
Women going through the criminal justice system face slut-shaming at trial, having to fight for access to menstrual products in prison, enduring the stares of some male guards, and what amounts to solitary confinement with fewer privileges and socialization than male inmates.
For 27 years, Pike was effectively in solitary confinement as the only woman on Tennessee's death row before she won the ability to interact with other inmates during meals, classes, and religious services.
"Female prisoners receive the worst of both worlds,” according to Stephanie Covington, a Southern California-based clinician specializing in trauma-informed responses to violence, and Barbara Bloom, a professor emeritus in criminal justice professor at Sonoma State University in California.
In recent years under more typical conditions, Pike's attorneys said in a clemency petition that she found an outlet both in painting and in "helping new women to the prison."
"After years of psychotherapy and medications to treat her mental illness," they wrote, "Christa is thoughtful, even-tempered, bright, funny, and hopeful."
Pike expressed remorse for Slemmer's murder in her clemency petition.
"Think back to the worst mistake you made as a reckless teenager. Well, mine happened to be huge, unforgettable and ruined countless lives," she wrote. "I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid. ... 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."
Only two women have been executed in the past decade, according to the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center.
In 2023, 49-year-old Amber McLaughlin became the first openly transgender person executed in the U.S. Missouri executed her by lethal injection for the 2003 rape and stabbing death of her ex-girlfriend, 45-year-old Beverly Guenther.
In 2021, 52-year-old Lisa Montgomery became the first woman executed by the federal government in 67 years. The federal government executed Montgomery by lethal injection in Indiana for the 2004 murder in Missouri of 23-year-old Bobbie Jo Stinnett. Montgomery strangled Stinnett, performed a crude cesarean section on her and fled with Stinnett's baby, who survived the attack.
The last woman to be executed in Tennessee is believed to be an unnamed Black woman who was hanged in 1819, according to historical records obtained by The Tennessean, part of the USA TODAY Network.
Before that, there was a hanging in 1808 of another Black women, whose name was also not recorded because she was enslaved and viewed as property, resulting in her removal from historical execution registries.
The earliest recorded execution of a woman in Tennessee was in 1807, when a Black woman named Mary Holcomb died by hanging on March 20. Though Holcomb was convicted of murder, many people of color were unjustly killed over false accusations or for no reason at all.
In 2010, a female death row inmate named Gaile Owens came within three months of being executed for hiring a hitman to kill her abusive husband Ron in 1985. But then-Gov. Phil Bredesen commuted Owens' sentence to life in prison because of the abuse she suffered from her husband.
Amanda Lee Myers is a senior crime and courts reporter who covers the death penalty, cold cases and breaking news for USA TODAY. Follow her on X at @amandaleeusat
