A federal appeals court issued a stay of execution Wednesday morning for Christa Pike, halting her scheduled death just one hour before Tennessee officials were to carry out the sentence at 10 a.m. in Nashville.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth District determined it required additional time to review claims submitted by Pike’s legal team regarding her childhood sexual abuse, allegations the state acknowledged during a special hearing this past August.
“The interests of justice and the finality of Pike’s impending execution compel the entry of a short stay of execution in order to properly analyze the parties’ fully briefed arguments and resolve the issues on the merits,” the court stated in its decision.
The duration of the stay remains undetermined at this time.
Pike, 50, has spent more than three decades on death row following her conviction in a brutal 1995 murder. She was 18 years old when Knoxville authorities say she and two teenage accomplices tortured, slashed, and beat to death 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer.
According to police records, the group lured Slemmer, a fellow student in their Job Corps training program, to an abandoned steam plant near the University of Tennessee campus. The case drew significant attention when investigators reported that someone had carved a pentagram into the victim’s chest, and Pike allegedly kept a piece of the victim’s skull as a trophy.
Pike has not disputed her participation in the killing. However, her defense team has argued that critical information about her background was never presented to the jury that sentenced her to death. Her attorneys maintain that Pike endured years of severe sexual and physical abuse beginning in early childhood, trauma that profoundly affected her mental state.
In their appeal to the Supreme Court, Pike’s lawyers argued she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from molestation and rape that began when she was a toddler. They contended that the execution process itself, which would require restraining her on a gurney, would constitute cruel and unusual punishment by triggering severe psychological trauma.
The state has not contested the fact that Pike experienced abuse during her childhood. Tennessee’s attorney general filed a response Monday, though the specifics of that filing were not immediately available.
Both Governor Bill Lee and the Supreme Court had previously declined to intervene in Pike’s case. In a letter to news media shared through her spiritual adviser, Pike wrote that she had found peace regardless of the outcome.
“I am not afraid to die,” Pike wrote. “I’m only nervous about the process.”
If the execution proceeds following the appeals court’s review, Pike would become the first woman executed by the state of Tennessee in more than two centuries, according to historical records.
Stephen Ferrell of the Federal Defenders Services of Eastern Tennessee praised the court’s decision. “The court has stayed this, recognizing the serious concerns about Christa’s scheduled execution,” he said.
The case now rests with the appeals court as it examines whether Pike should be permitted to reopen proceedings to present evidence of her childhood trauma. Her legal team believes such evidence, if presented to a jury today, would make a death sentence far from certain.
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