US appeals court halts Tennessee execution of Christa Pike

Christa Pike was set to become the first woman executed by Tennessee in more than 200 years.

A federal appeals court has temporarily stopped Tennessee from executing death row inmate Christa Pike, intervening less than two hours before she was due to receive a lethal injection.

The 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals granted what it called a “short stay of execution” on Wednesday while judges consider Pike’s argument that evidence of sexual abuse she experienced as a child was not properly weighed when she was sentenced.

Tennessee officials quickly turned to the US Supreme Court, asking the justices to lift the stay and allow the execution to proceed.

Pike, 50, had been scheduled to die at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. Had the execution gone ahead, she would have been the first woman executed by Tennessee in more than two centuries.

She was sentenced to death for the 1995 killing of Colleen Slemmer, a 19-year-old classmate at a Knoxville vocational centre.

Pike was 18 when she, her 17-year-old boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp, and another teenager tortured and killed Slemmer. Pike and Shipp were later convicted of first-degree murder. Shipp received a life sentence with the possibility of parole.

Pike’s lawyers have argued that her childhood was marked by violence, neglect and sexual abuse, including rapes when she was 11 and 17 years old. They also cited her later diagnoses of bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder in seeking to have her sentence reduced to life without parole.

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee rejected that clemency request. Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, has publicly supported the execution.

The case has also attracted international scrutiny, with a group of United Nations human rights experts calling for Pike’s death sentence to be commuted.

Women have accounted for just 18 of the 1,683 executions carried out in the US since capital punishment resumed in 1976. Pike’s case is more unusual still: If the execution ultimately proceeds, she would be the only person in Tennessee’s modern death penalty era put to death for a crime committed as a teenager.