A federal appeals court stopped Tennessee from executing Christa Pike on Wednesday morning, about an hour before the 50-year-old was due to die by lethal injection at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. The 2-1 ruling turns on a legal fight over Tennessee’s recent change of position on whether she was sexually abused as a child.
Why Christa Pike’s execution was stopped
For years, according to Pike’s lawyers, Tennessee argued in court that she had made up her claims of sexual abuse. At a recent hearing, the state changed course and said it did not dispute that she had been sexually abused and raped.
Her legal team moved quickly. They asked the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals to send their motion back to a lower federal court. Their argument was that if earlier federal rulings relied on the state’s old claim that Pike was lying, her federal review may have been flawed from the start.
The appeals court now has to decide how to treat that filing. It could send it back to district court as a motion to reopen her earlier habeas case. Or it could treat it as a second habeas petition, which faces strict legal limits.
Judge Jane Stranch ordered the execution stayed “until further order of this court.” The panel said it needed more time with the arguments and did not say how long the pause would last.
A week of legal defeats
The stay came after a string of losses for Pike. Gov. Bill Lee rejected her clemency request, and on Tuesday the U.S. Supreme Court declined to step in.
Her attorneys had also challenged how Tennessee planned to kill her. They argued that the state’s execution procedures could cause her unnecessary suffering, which would violate constitutional protections. She has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and bipolar disorder.
The 1995 killing and the question of age
Pike was 18 when she, her then-boyfriend and a third friend lured classmate Colleen Slemmer into the woods and beat and stabbed her to death. Pike and Slemmer, who was 19, were both students at the Knoxville Job Corps, a program for low-income young people.
A jury convicted Pike in 1996, and she has spent nearly three decades on death row. Her boyfriend, Shipp, received life with the possibility of parole. The third participant testified against Pike and was given probation.
She became one of the youngest women ever sent to death row. Her lawyers have argued that her age alone should have ruled out a death sentence, citing research on adolescent brain development. As they put it, “an 18-year-old brain is not an adult brain.”
Now the Supreme Court must decide
Within hours of the stay, Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti’s office asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn it. “This Court should vacate the stay,” the office wrote. It argued that Pike had never asked for a stay, and that the appeals court had not found she was likely to win or addressed how late her filing came.
Witnesses and reporters stayed at the prison in case the justices acted quickly. If they don’t and Pike is not executed by the end of Wednesday, the Tennessee Supreme Court will have to set a new date.
If her execution does go ahead, Pike will be the first woman put to death by Tennessee since the early 1800s.
