6th Circuit Halts Christa Pike's Execution an Hour Before Scheduled Death, Tennessee Appeals to Supreme Court

Tennessee came within roughly an hour of putting Christa Gail Pike to death Wednesday before a federal appeals court stopped the lethal injection at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, according to CNN and Minnesota Public Radio News. Witnesses and media who had already gathered at the prison stayed put because Tennessee's attorney general immediately appealed the stay to the U.S. Supreme Court, which had rejected an earlier bid to halt the execution just days before.

The 6th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals voted 2-1 to pause the execution so it can review whether Pike's allegations of childhood sexual abuse and rape were fully presented to the jury that sentenced her, per CNN and MPR. Assistant Federal Defender Stephen Ferrell has argued Pike's trial lawyers never gave jurors the full picture of her background or made the case that her age at the time, 18, should have mattered.

Gov. Bill Lee denied Pike's clemency request Monday. "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, according to The Guardian. Pike's attorneys said they were "deeply saddened and heartbroken," adding that the decision dismissed "decades of research about the amount of responsibility an 18-year-old, especially one with severe trauma, should bear."

What the case is actually about

Pike, now 50, was 18 in January 1995 when she, her 17-year-old boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp, and 18-year-old Shadolla Peterson lured 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, their classmate at Knoxville Job Corps, into a wooded area and killed her, according to Al Jazeera. A pentagram was carved into Slemmer's body, and Pike reportedly kept a piece of her skull. Pike has never denied her role.

She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and PTSD after the killing. Ferrell says she was sexually abused from toddlerhood and raped at 11 and 17. Her clemency petition said she only meant to fight Slemmer but couldn't "put the brakes on" during what she called a frenzied attack. "I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid," Pike said in her statement. "It sickens me now to think I had the ability to commit such a crime."

Colleen Slemmer's mother, May Martinez, wants the execution carried out. She and her husband traveled from Florida, with help from a fundraising group, to witness it. "Not a day goes by, or a minute goes by that I do not think about Colleen," Martinez told the Associated Press. Slemmer would have turned 51 this September, per NPR.

The sentencing gap that won't go away

Pike got death. Shipp, who was 17 and by Tennessee's own appellate record helped torture Slemmer, including stopping her escape attempts and gagging her, got life with the possibility of parole, according to Newsweek. Peterson, who cooperated and pleaded guilty as an accessory, got probation.

There are legal reasons for each outcome. Shipp's age put him outside capital eligibility. Peterson's cooperation and lesser charge placed her in a different category entirely. Pike's jury found two statutory aggravating factors, including torture beyond what was necessary to cause death, per the Tennessee Supreme Court's own findings. None of that is in dispute.

But three teenagers involved in the same killing landed on wildly different points on the spectrum from probation to death. That's the argument Pike's supporters, including the ACLU and Amnesty International, have pushed the hardest: not that she's innocent, but that the system's outcome for her looks like an outlier next to the other two.

The counter to that is straightforward. Individualized sentencing is the whole point of post-Furman capital law. Juries are supposed to weigh conduct, culpability, and cooperation differently for different defendants, and Pike's jury did exactly that, finding aggravating circumstances a separate jury never found for Shipp. Treating three different legal postures identically would arguably be less fair, not more.

What happens now

The Supreme Court has not yet ruled on Tennessee's appeal of the 6th Circuit stay. Al Jazeera reported that Pike has asked, through a filing cited by The New York Post, to be executed by an all-female firing squad rather than lethal injection, though no court has acted on that request.

Death penalty lawyer Clive Stafford Smith told Al Jazeera that a Tennessee execution of a woman would be "a step back to about 1820," the last time the state put a woman to death. Whether that execution ultimately happens now depends on how fast, and how, the Supreme Court rules on Tennessee's emergency appeal, with witnesses still waiting at Riverbend for word.