Tennessee Execution of Christa Pike Halted One Hour Before

The execution of Christa Pike, who would have become the first woman put to death in Tennessee in more than 200 years, was halted by a federal appeals court on Wednesday, one hour before she was scheduled to die by lethal injection at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.⁸¹²¹

The crime and conviction

Pike was found guilty and given a death sentence in 1996 for killing Colleen Slemmer, 19, a fellow student at a Knoxville job-training program. Pike, her boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp and a third accomplice, Shadolla Peterson, lured Slemmer into a wooded area in January 1995, where she was tortured and killed; the attackers carved a pentagram into her chest and Pike later kept a piece of Slemmer's skull, which she went on to boast about.³¹⁰²¹

Pike does not deny committing the killing, which prosecutors said followed her viewing Slemmer as a rival for her boyfriend's affections. Shipp, a teenager at the time of the crime, was sentenced to life in prison with eventual parole eligibility—later denied—whereas Peterson was placed on probation. Pike was also convicted of attempted first-degree murder over a 2001 assault on a fellow inmate, Patricia Jones.⁶⁷⁴⁵

Path to the stay

Governor Bill Lee denied Pike clemency days before the scheduled execution, and the U.S. Supreme Court separately rejected a request from her attorneys to halt the process. Fourteen days before the execution, under lethal injection protocol, Pike was returned to solitary confinement, a setting she had gained more freedom from after a 2024 settlement in a lawsuit over solitary confinement.²¹⁰¹

Witnesses had already gathered at Riverbend when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit issued its stay, voting 2-1 to halt the execution so it could "properly analyze the parties' fully briefed arguments and resolve the issues on the merits." A dissenting judge described the legal challenge as a "last-ditch meritless effort to delay a lawful execution."⁹¹⁰¹¹

Mental health and abuse claims

Pike, now 50, has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, and her mother is reported to have drunk heavily during pregnancy. Her lawyers argued that lethal injection would cause her severe traumatic flashbacks tied to childhood sexual abuse. At a recent hearing Tennessee said it did not dispute that Pike suffered sexual abuse and rape, though the state had for years argued she had lied about the abuse, according to the BBC.⁴⁵³

Pike's legal team said she had changed since the crime, describing her as "a 50-year-old remorseful woman who understands her actions," adding that "the 18-year-old girl suffering from severe mental illness and near-debilitating trauma no longer exists." A clinical psychologist who assessed her childhood trauma called it "truly extreme." Pike herself said in her clemency petition that she had been a "mentally ill 18-year-old kid."²¹²¹⁰

Women and the death penalty

Pike remains the sole woman currently held on Tennessee's death row, and the state had carried out 17 executions before Wednesday. Since 1976, 18 of the 1,683 people executed in the United States have been women, about one percent of the total. Among recent examples are Missouri's 2023 execution of Amber McLaughlin, thought to be the first time a transgender woman was put to death in the U.S., and the federal execution of Lisa Montgomery in 2021, the first time in nearly seventy years that the federal government executed a woman.⁶⁷⁴⁵

Human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith remarked that executions of women are uncommon nationwide, and even more so in Tennessee, where two centuries had passed since the last one. Smith added that the execution amounted to turning the clock back to roughly 1820, and he questioned whether it would truly "make the world a more civilised place." Robin M. Maher of the Death Penalty Information Center said societal views on who deserves a death sentence have shifted since Pike was sentenced.²¹

What comes next

Tennessee's Attorney General's Office promptly petitioned the Supreme Court to lift the stay. The ACLU's Capital Punishment Project called on Governor Lee to "respect the court's decision and call off her execution." Should further proceedings go a certain way, Tennessee's Supreme Court remains able to schedule a fresh execution date for Pike.¹⁰¹²¹¹