Woman sentenced to death in Tennessee for murder gets appeal court reprieve two hours before execution

A U.S. appeals court on Wednesday halted the execution of death row inmate Christa Pike in Tennessee, just less than two hours before she was scheduled to die.

The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered a “short stay of execution” to give it time to weigh Pike’s claim that her allegations of childhood sexual abuse were not adequately considered during her sentencing.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected an 11th-hour bid for a stay of execution, which is set to take place at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, the state capital.

Currently the only woman on Tennessee’s death row, Pike's execution would have made her the first woman the state of Tennessee has put to death in more than two hundred years.

Pike, whose clemency was denied by Governor Bill Lee, would be the only person in the modern era of US capital punishment to be executed in Tennessee for a crime committed as a teenager.

Pike, 50, was 18 in January 1995 when she, her 17-year-old boyfriend and a third companion lured 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a classmate at their Knoxville Job Corps vocational center, into a wooded area where they tortured and killed her.

The grisly nature of the murder, which involved the perpetrators carving the shape of a pentagram in the victim’s chest and taking a chunk of her skull as a souvenir of the carnage, drew intense media coverage at the time.

Trial testimony indicated that Pike viewed Slemmer as a rival for the affections of her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp.

Pike and Shipp confessed to the killing, and both were convicted the following year of first-degree murder. Pike was sentenced to death, while Shipp received a life sentence with the possibility of parole.

Their co-defendant, Shadolla Peterson, who was 18 at the time of the murder and had acted as a lookout for the other two, appeared as a witness for the prosecution and received probation.

Pike was also convicted in August 2001 of attempted first-degree murder in an assault on another inmate, according to the Tennessee Department of Correction.

In a 226-page petition asking the governor to commute her death penalty to a life sentence without the possibility of parole, her lawyers documented her history as the childhood victim of violence, neglect and sexual abuse, including two rapes at ages 11 and 17. And they cited the diagnoses she received in prison for bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Her lawyers also pointed to evidence that Pike’s mother drank heavily during pregnancy, contributing to faulty brain development that made it difficult for their client to control her impulses as a young person.

“The 18-year-old girl suffering from severe mental illness and near-debilitating trauma no longer exists,” her lawyers wrote in response to Lee’s denial of clemency.

“Christa is a 50-year-old remorseful woman who understands her actions, receives proper treatment for her mental illness, and provides for and guides fellow incarcerated women.”

Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, has spoken out in support of the execution.

Pike’s case has drawn international attention, with a group of United Nations human rights experts issuing a recent statement calling for commutation of her death sentence.