A divided U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday cleared the way for Tennessee to move forward with the execution of Christa Pike, lifting a last-minute stay issued by a federal appeals court less than two hours before she was scheduled to die by lethal injection.
In a 6-3 decision, the high court granted Tennessee’s emergency request to lift the temporary block. Pike, who tortured and murdered a classmate, is set to become the first woman put to death in Tennessee in more than 200 years.
The ruling allows Tennessee to carry out the execution before Pike’s death warrant expires at midnight local time Wednesday.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.
“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, I respectfully dissent,” Sotomayor wrote for the liberal wing.
Hours before the Supreme Court’s intervention, a divided 2-1 panel of the 6th Circuit blocked the execution to consider claims that Pike’s jury never heard about her childhood sexual abuse. Judge Richard Griffin dissented, calling the bid a “last-ditch meritless effort to delay a lawful execution,” The Daily Wire reported.
Pike, who is now 50, was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of her classmate, Colleen Slemmer, 19, a fellow student at the Knoxville Job Corps Center. Pike lured Slemmer into the woods with her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp. Pike cut Slemmer’s throat, struck her with a meat cleaver and with a piece of asphalt before they carved a pentagram into her forehead and chest, according to court documents. Pike kept a piece of Slemmer’s skull as a trophy and bragged about the killing to friends.
In 1996, a jury convicted the then- 18-year-old of first-degree murder. She has spent decades behind bars on death row ever since. In prison, Pike almost strangled fellow inmate Patricia Jones with a shoelace in 2001, landing her a separate attempted first-degree murder conviction.
Pike’s attorneys argued that she suffered lasting trauma from childhood sexual abuse that her trial lawyers failed to adequately present to the jury. Court records say the abuse began when Pike was 2. She was later raped by a stranger living nearby and by her mother’s live-in boyfriend, The Daily Wire reported.
Her attorneys asked Tennessee Republican Gov. Bill Lee to intervene, but he declined. “After deliberate consideration of Christa Gail Pike’s request for clemency, and after a thorough review of the case, I am upholding the sentence of the State of Tennessee and do not plan to intervene,” Lee said Monday.
Her attorneys said they were “deeply saddened and heartbroken” by his decision. And in a dramatic reversal, Pike says she now feels remorse. “I’m very remorseful now; I wasn’t in the beginning when I first caught this charge,” she said. “I didn’t care what I had done.”
“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 added in her clemency petition.
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