Christa Pike, 50, was spared from execution just one hour before she was due to receive a lethal injection in Tennessee on September 30. The execution was halted after judges said they want to review whether her allegations of sexual abuse and rape as a child were fully considered before she was sentenced to death. This would have been the state's first execution of a woman in at least 200 years.
Execution halted at Riverbend
Execution witnesses had already gathered at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville when the order came down at around 9 am local time. It wasn't immediately clear if Tennessee's attorney general was appealing the decision or how long the execution might be delayed.
Pike was 18 when she was convicted of stabbing and beating 19-year-old classmate Colleen Slemmer at a job training facility in Knoxville in 1995. She and her boyfriend were both convicted of the murder.
Case drew attention during 'satanic panic'
The case garnered widespread attention at the time in part because a pentagram carved on Slemmer's body and other elements of the crime stoked fears of Satan worship during the "satanic panic" of the 1980s and 1990s. While Pike does not deny the killing, her supporters have argued that the state should consider her age at the time, along with her mental illness and history of severe sexual abuse, including being raped from the time she was a toddler.
Assistant Federal Defender Stephen Ferrell said Pike's death sentence is an outlier because other 18-year-olds sentenced to death in Tennessee have had their sentences vacated. On Tuesday, the US Supreme Court denied a request from Pike's lawyers to halt the execution, while Tennessee governor Bill Lee also denied her clemency on Monday.
Pike's statement and victim's family reaction
"I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid. It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I'd done," Pike said in a statement included in her clemency petition. "Even more to accept how many lives I affected. 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."
Ms Slemmer's mother, May Martinez, had said she wanted the lethal injection to go forward, saying she's waited decades to see Pike being sentenced. "Every time I think about it, I think about Colleen feeling that pain and trying to get up and run," she said in an interview. Martinez said a group helped raise money so she and her husband could travel from Florida to witness the execution.
Prosecutors' account and rarity of female executions
Prosecutors said Pike, fearing Ms Slemmer was trying to steal her boyfriend, lured her to a wooded area on January 12, 1995. Pike cut Slemmer with a box cutter and beat her with a large chunk of asphalt. Shipp, Pike's boyfriend, admitted that he was the one who carved a pentagram, a star-shaped symbol associated with Satanism, into her body. Shipp was 17 when the crime happened and received a sentence of life in prison with the possibility of parole. Pike was the only one sentenced to death.
Tennessee has not executed a woman for at least 200 years, according to Robin M. Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. Older records can be spotty, though, so it's difficult to know precise details about the last woman who was put to death there. It's a rarity across the US: since 1976, 18 women have been put to death in the country, representing about 1 per cent of all executions, according to the centre. Most recently, Missouri in 2023 executed Amber McLaughlin for a 2003 killing, in what is believed to be the first execution of a transgender woman in the US. In 2021, the federal government executed Lisa Montgomery, marking the first time in nearly seven decades that the US government put a female inmate to death.
