The Supreme Court on Wednesday authorized Tennessee to carry out the execution of Christa Pike, after leaving without effect the temporary suspension granted hours earlier by the Federal Court of Appeals of the Sixth Circuit.
Pike, 50, has been in the death hall for more than three decades after the murder of Colleen Slemmer, a 19-year-old woman he knew from the professional training center where they both studied in Knoxville.
The execution is planned by lethal injection in the highest-security prison of Riverbend, in Nashville. However, until the time indicated in the available information, the authorities had not communicated a new time to carry out it after the suspension and subsequent decision of the Supreme Court.
Pike would be the first woman to be executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.
The execution was scheduled for Wednesday morning. When it was about an hour away, the Sixth Circuit Federal Court of Appeals ordered the proceedings to be temporarily halted to review the arguments raised by Pike’s lawyers.
The federal court reviews the decisions of the courts of Kentucky, Ohio, Michigan and Tennessee. The defense’s approach focused, among other aspects, on the fact that during the original trial the jury did not receive evidence related to the abuses that Christa Pike suffered during her childhood and adolescence.
The decision came after several attempts to stop the execution. The Tennessee Supreme Court had rejected a petition last week and the U.S. Supreme Court had rejected another petition on Tuesday.
Tennessee Governor, Republican Bill Lee, had also rejected a request for clemency. While the suspension was reviewed, the Tennessee Attorney General’s Office said it would continue to defend compliance with the sentence imposed on Pike.
The resolution on Wednesday was backed by the six conservative Supreme Court judges who voted in favour of lifting the suspension.
The three progressive judges, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, voted against.
The three judges who voted against pointed out that the decision allowed the state to execute Pike before thoroughly reviewing the appeals still pending against his sentence.
Following the ruling, Pike was left without legal remedies, according to the information provided, although a new date and time for the execution had not been announced.
The case dates back to 1995, when Pike was 18 and Slemmer, 19, according to court records, Pike acted alongside his then boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, who was 17, and Shadolla Peterson.
According to the investigation and the case documents, the young woman was attacked and died after receiving multiple beats.
Pike declared to the police that he thought Slemmer was trying to take away his boyfriend and that he initially intended to face her.
Judicial documents indicate that Pike had commented to a companion, a day before the crime, that he was going to kill Slemmer.
He also acknowledged before the police that he struck and kicked the young woman, cut her neck and repeatedly hit her in the head with pieces of asphalt.
Slemmer attempted to escape on several occasions during an attack that lasted more than half an hour.
The records also indicate that the victim was carved a pentagram in the chest.
Pike was convicted in 1996 for the murder. His then boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, was sentenced to life imprisonment. The other participant, Shadolla Peterson, collaborated with the authorities and declared against Pike and Shipp, so she received a lesser sentence and obtained conditional release.
The difference between the convictions is part of the background of the case that led Pike to death for more than three decades.
Pike’s lawyers requested that the death sentence be replaced with life imprisonment without the possibility of conditional release.
One of the main arguments of his latest appeals was the history of sexual and physical abuse that Pike suffered since childhood, in addition to the diagnoses related to his mental health.
The petition for clemency notes that Pike suffered sexual assault between the ages of 2 and 5 by her grandmother’s boyfriend.
At the age of 11, according to the document and summary published by the Center for Information on the Death Penalty (DPI), a neighbor raped her. The man was arrested and faced an indictment for indecent acts with a minor, but he was not jailed.
At the age of 17, Pike was raped again, this time by a stranger, and later diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress.
Their lawyers argued that mental health problems they did not receive treatment, along with the history of abuse, affected their ability to contain themselves at the time of the crime.
Another element raised by the defense was that Pike was 18 when he committed the murder. Lawyers noted that Tennessee has annulled the death sentences of seven people, all men, for crimes committed when they were 18.
They also indicated that no other person of that age had been sentenced to death in Tennessee since the Pike case, which occurred three decades ago.
In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court banned the death penalty for crimes committed before the age of 18.
Between 2020 and 2025, convictions for crimes committed between the ages of 18 and 20 accounted for 5% of new death sentences, according to the Center for Information on the Death Penalty.
In his request for clemency, Pike acknowledged his responsibility for the murder and referred to his age and psychological state when it happened.
According to information provided by AP, she wrote that she was an 18-year-old girl with a mental illness and that it took years to understand the seriousness of what she had done and the number of people affected by the crime. He also recognized the impact that Slemmer’s death had on his family.
While the defense sought to stop the execution, May Martínez, the mother of Colleen Slemmer, had asked for the sentence to be fulfilled.
Martínez had announced that he would travel from Jacksonville, Florida, to Nashville to witness the execution.
In an interview given this month to a local channel in Knoxville, she questioned that public attention had concentrated mainly on Pike and expressed that her daughter had been relegated in the coverage of the case.
Martínez claimed Colleen is no longer with her and regretted it was as if her daughter had never existed.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court restored the death penalty in 1976, 18 women have been executed, compared to more than 1,600 men, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
In the past year, 29 executions have been carried out in the United States, according to the information provided. On Tuesday, Curtis Beasley, 77, was executed in Florida for a murder committed in 1995. It was the 16th Florida execution this year.
In July, Florida executed two people on the same day, something that had not happened in that state since 1964.
In August, Oklahoma, Alabama and Tennessee carried out executions during the same day, a situation that has not been recorded since 2010.
