Tennessee execution of Christa Pike can go ahead, US supreme court rules

Tennessee is set to execute a woman for the first time in 200 years on Wednesday, after the US supreme court lifted a lower-court ruling that put her execution on pause earlier in the day.

Christa Pike, who was convicted of murder 30 years ago, was initially scheduled to die by lethal injection on Wednesday morning until her execution was halted hours earlier by a federal appeals court.

In a 2-1 ruling, that court said the delay was necessary to assess whether Pike’s allegations of childhood sexual abuse were fully considered at her sentencing. The state governor and the supreme court had earlier refused calls for clemency.

Tennessee’s attorney general immediately appealed the ruling to the supreme court, writing that the 11th-hour stay rewarded “abusive delay tactics by Pike’s attorneys”, according to the Associated Press.

The US supreme court sided with Tennessee in an order signed by justice Brett Kavanaugh. A Tennessee department of correction spokesperson said the execution would proceed on Wednesday night.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by fellow liberal justices Elena Kagan and Kentanji Brown Jackson, dissented from the court’s order “because its decision clears the way for the state to execute Pike before her still-pending legal challenges to her conviction can be properly considered”.

Pike, who is now 50, was 18 when she and her boyfriend, who was 17 at the time, killed 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, one of their classmates at Knoxville Job Corps in 1995.

The case garnered nationwide headlines due to the ages of those involved and the brutality of the murder.

According to prosecutors, Pike was worried Slemmer was trying to take her then boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, away fom her. Together, they lured Slemmer into a wooded area behind the agriculture campus steam plant at the University of Tennessee on 12 January 1995. Pike cut Slemmer’s stomach and throat with a box cutter before smashing her head with a rock.

Shipp carved a pentagram into Slemmer’s chest and Pike later showed a friend a fragment of Slemmer’s skull.

Shipp was convicted of first-degree murder in 1997 and was given a life sentence with the possibility of parole.

Pike has never denied her involvement in Slemmer’s killing and was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.

“I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid. It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I’d done. 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,” Pike said in a statement that was included in her clemency petition.

On Saturday, May Martinez, Slemmer’s mother, said she was waiting for Pike’s execution.

“Every time I think about it, I think about Colleen feeling that pain and trying to get up and run,” Martinez told the Associated Press, adding: “Not a day goes by, or a minute goes by that I do not think about Colleen. Holidays are the worst.”

The Associated Press contributed reporting