A federal appeals court halted the execution of Christa Pike on Wednesday just one hour before she was scheduled to receive a lethal injection, granting a dramatic last-minute reprieve to the only woman on Tennessee’s death row after witnesses had already begun gathering at the prison.
Pike, 50, had been scheduled to die at 10 a.m. local time, 6 p.m. in Israel, at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. Had the execution gone ahead, she would have become the first woman executed by Tennessee in more than 200 years and the 19th woman put to death in the United States since executions resumed in 1976.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit issued the stay about an hour before the scheduled execution as it considers whether evidence that Pike suffered severe sexual abuse and rape as a child was adequately taken into account before she was sentenced to death in 1996.
It was not immediately clear whether Tennessee’s attorney general would challenge the ruling or how long the execution could be delayed.
The intervention came only hours after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a separate attempt by Pike’s attorneys to stop the execution, seemingly clearing the final major legal obstacle to the sentence being carried out.
Preparations were already well underway. People who were scheduled to witness the execution had begun assembling at the Nashville prison when word came that the process had been stopped.
Pike had also declined the special last meal offered to condemned prisoners, entering what had been expected to be her final hours without requesting one.
Colleen Slemmer, who was lured to a secluded area, tortured and murdered
Murdered at 18, sentenced to death at 20
Pike was 18 when she murdered 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer on Jan. 12, 1995.
Slemmer was enrolled with Pike and Pike’s boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, in a vocational training program in Knoxville. Prosecutors said Pike became convinced that Slemmer was interested in Shipp and, driven by jealousy and rage, lured her to an isolated area on the University of Tennessee campus.
There, Pike and Shipp tortured and killed her. Pike cut Slemmer with a box cutter and beat her with a large piece of asphalt, while a pentagram was carved into the victim’s body.
The details of the killing drew particular attention during the “Satanic panic” of the 1980s and 1990s, a period marked by widespread fears in the United States over alleged satanic cults and ritual abuse.
Pike’s 1996 death sentence made her one of the youngest women ever sent to death row in the United States.
She has never denied responsibility for Slemmer’s murder. The battle over her execution has instead centered on her age at the time of the crime, her mental health and what her lawyers say jurors were never adequately told about the severe abuse she endured as a child.
Abuse, rape and mental illness
Pike’s lawyers say her childhood was marked by neglect and severe sexual abuse, including rapes when she was 11 and 17.
She was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Her current attorney, Stephen Ferrell, has argued that Pike’s trial lawyers failed during the sentencing phase to present jurors with crucial evidence about her background and failed to place sufficient emphasis on the fact that she had only recently turned 18.
Her lawyers have also argued that scientific understanding of adolescent brain development has changed substantially in the three decades since Pike was sentenced and that a death sentence for someone who committed a crime at 18 is now exceptionally rare.
They have pointed to the different sentence received by Shipp, who was 17 when Slemmer was murdered and received life imprisonment with the possibility of parole because of his age.
Those issues are now at the center of the appeals court’s last-minute intervention, with judges seeking to examine whether Pike’s claims about childhood abuse and sexual violence received full consideration before the death sentence was imposed.
‘It makes me sick’
Earlier this week, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee rejected Pike’s request for clemency.
Her attorneys argued in the petition that untreated mental illness had left her unable to “hit the brakes” when she committed the murder.
Pike herself expressed remorse.
“I was an 18-year-old kid and mentally unstable,” she said. “It took me many years just to understand the gravity of what I had done, and even longer to understand how many lives I destroyed.”
“I took someone’s daughter, sister and friend,” she added. “It makes me sick today to think that I was capable of committing such a crime.”
Before Lee rejected the clemency request, Pike said in a letter to the media that she had found a measure of peace regardless of whether she was executed.
“I’m not afraid to die,” she said. “I’m just nervous about the process itself.”
Supreme Court had refused to intervene
Pike’s attorneys had made another attempt to stop the execution at the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing in part that her post-traumatic stress disorder could cause “severe mental suffering and heightened psychological terror” when she was restrained on a gurney for the lethal injection.
The Supreme Court denied her application for a stay on Tuesday and also declined to hear her petition, leaving the execution free to proceed unless another court intervened.
That intervention came Wednesday morning from the Sixth Circuit, with barely an hour remaining before the scheduled execution.
Pike had also asked that women carry out as much of the execution process as possible, arguing that the presence of men during her final moments could trigger trauma associated with her history of sexual abuse. Tennessee corrections officials had said they would try to accommodate at least some of those requests.
Executions of women remain extremely rare in the United States. Eighteen women have been executed since 1976, roughly 1% of all executions during that period, and Tennessee has not executed a woman since 1820.
For now, Pike remains on death row. The question is no longer whether she will be executed Wednesday, but whether the federal court’s renewed examination of the evidence surrounding her childhood and sentencing will produce only a delay or a more fundamental change in her case.
First published: 16:39, 09.30.26