A federal appeals court on Wednesday stopped the execution of Christa Gail Pike, the only woman on Tennessee’s death row, hours before she was to die by lethal injection at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ordered the execution stayed “until further order of this court,” after the Supreme Court had earlier rejected a bid to halt it. A divided panel of the court said the pause was needed “in order to properly analyze the parties’ fully briefed arguments,” according to The New York Times. The state has since asked the Supreme Court to lift the stay, according to local television reports.
Had the sentence been carried out, Ms. Pike, 50, would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee since 1820, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, and the 18th woman put to death in the United States since 1976, out of 1,683 executions in that time.
Ms. Pike was 18 in January 1995 when she and two fellow students at a Job Corps vocational center in Knoxville lured Colleen Slemmer, 19, whom Ms. Pike saw as a romantic rival, into a wooded area and tortured and killed her. Her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, later admitted carving a pentagram into Ms. Slemmer’s chest. Ms. Pike kept a piece of the skull. She and Mr. Shipp were convicted of first-degree murder in 1996; he received life with the possibility of parole.
Ms. Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, has spoken in support of the execution. Ms. Pike’s lawyers say she is no longer the person who committed the crime. “Christa is a 50-year-old remorseful woman who understands her actions,” they wrote. “The 18-year-old girl suffering from severe mental illness and near-debilitating trauma no longer exists.”
In a clemency petition that Gov. Bill Lee denied, her lawyers pointed to evidence that her mother drank heavily during pregnancy, impairing Ms. Pike’s brain development, and to a childhood of violence, neglect and sexual abuse, including rapes at 11 and 17. She has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. A group of United Nations human rights experts called for her sentence to be commuted.
Ms. Pike’s legal team wouldn’t accept lethal injection. According to a report in The New York Post, she asked instead to be shot by an all-female firing squad, with members of Ms. Slemmer’s family among the witnesses — both a feared-from account of a painful death and a response to trauma experts who warned that the injection procedures could trigger flashbacks of the sexual abuse she suffered. Her lawyers also said small veins and a blood condition could make placing an IV line difficult, a claim the state disputes. In May, state prison officials abandoned the execution of another prisoner, Tony Carruthers, after failing to find a suitable vein.
Tennessee is not among the five states that authorize the firing squad. In court in August, her lawyers proposed hanging — the method the state last used on a woman in 1820 — but the state said it had neither the equipment nor the legal authority, and the judge agreed, while allowing the possibility of an all-female execution team. Because her crime predates January 1999, Ms. Pike could have chosen the electric chair.
Twenty-seven states allow the death penalty; four have paused it. Lethal injection is authorized everywhere the penalty exists, electrocution in nine states, gas in nine and the firing squad in five. Since 2008, prisoners challenging a method have had to name a feasible alternative that significantly reduces the risk of severe pain. An autopsy of Mikal Mahdi, shot in South Carolina in 2025, found only two of three bullets struck him, and neither hit his heart.
“Christa was just a teenager, and had undergone horrendous abuse as a child,” said Clive Stafford Smith, a lawyer who has represented many death row prisoners, in an interview with Al Jazeera. “Now she is 50, a totally different person. It is so pointless — will this really make the world a more civilised place?”
What happens now rests with the courts: the stay holds until the Sixth Circuit rules again, or the Supreme Court lifts it, as it has done with several recent stays. “The Supreme Court has been overturning stays recently,” Mr. Stafford Smith said.