NASHVILLE, TN — A federal appeals court stopped Tennessee’s plan to execute Christa Gail Pike about an hour before the lethal injection was set to begin, putting the 50-year-old’s case back before the courts. The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued the stay on a 2-1 vote while it considers whether her claims of childhood sexual abuse and rape were fully weighed at sentencing.
Pike was convicted in the 1995 killing of Colleen Slemmer, a 19-year-old classmate at a Knoxville job training facility. The case drew national attention at the time and was set to become a grim milestone: Pike would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in at least 200 years.
How the 1995 Knoxville killing led to a death sentence
Prosecutors said Pike believed Slemmer was trying to steal her boyfriend and lured her to a wooded area on Jan. 12, 1995. They said Pike cut Slemmer with a box cutter and beat her with a large piece of asphalt during the attack.
Pike’s boyfriend, Shipp, was also convicted in the killing. He admitted carving a pentagram, a star-shaped symbol associated with Satan, into Slemmer’s body. The notoriety of that detail, along with other parts of the crime, fueled fears during the “satanic panic” era of the 1980s and 1990s.
Shipp was 17 at the time and received life in prison with the possibility of parole. Pike was the only defendant sentenced to death.
Attorneys argue Pike’s childhood abuse should have mattered at sentencing
Pike’s lawyers have argued that the trial jury never had a full chance to consider the abuse she says she endured as a child. In filings, they said ignoring that history violates basic fairness in death penalty cases.
They say Pike was raped beginning when she was a toddler and later was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. In her clemency petition, Pike said she was a mentally ill 18-year-old when the killing happened and that she killed in a frenzied attack after losing control.
She has also said she understands the damage caused by the killing and now sees the scope of what she did. Her attorneys argue the case should be viewed in light of her age, mental health and the abuse she described.
Tennessee quickly asks the Supreme Court to let the execution proceed
Once the appeals court granted the stay, Tennessee’s attorney general immediately appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Witnesses and media stayed at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville in case the high court allowed the execution to move forward.
The attorney general’s office said the last-minute halt traumatized Slemmer’s family and amounted to another round of delay tactics by Pike’s lawyers. The Supreme Court had not immediately resolved the request after the stay was entered.
The legal fight has now shifted to whether the execution can proceed at all or whether Pike’s sentencing must be reviewed more closely in light of the abuse allegations raised by her defense team.
Slemmer’s mother says she has waited decades for the sentence to be carried out
Colleen Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, said she had long hoped to see the execution carried out. Speaking to The Associated Press, she said she has spent decades thinking about her daughter and the pain of her death.
Martinez said family members had traveled from Florida with help from supporters who helped raise money for the trip to witness the execution. She also said her daughter’s age should matter in any assessment of the case, noting that Slemmer would have turned 51 in September.
After the stay was announced, Martinez did not respond to a message seeking comment. Her comments before the halted execution reflected the deep divide in the case between the victim’s family and Pike’s supporters.
Why the case stands out in death penalty history
Executions of women remain rare in the United States, and Tennessee has not executed a woman for at least 200 years, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Older records are incomplete, so the historical record is not perfectly clear.
Since the Supreme Court restored the death penalty in 1976, 18 women have been executed nationwide, or about 1% of all executions, the center says. Recent examples include Missouri’s 2023 execution of Amber McLaughlin and the federal government’s 2021 execution of Lisa Montgomery.
If carried out, Pike’s execution would have been the 30th in the U.S. this year, following a Florida execution on Tuesday. The case also renewed broader debate over how the justice system treats defendants who were 18 at the time of their crimes.
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