Pike spared execution, for now, by 6th Circuit
Christa Pike on Wednesday morning was spared execution in Tennessee by the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Gov. Bill Lee, the second-term Republican, had said Monday he would not intervene. The state Supreme Court declined her petition Tuesday evening. The appellate court halted the scheduled 10 a.m. proceedings inside Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.
Pike remains on death row in the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center in Nashville, an all-female prison.
How long the stay will be in place wasn’t announced. The court’s ruling said in part, the “interests of justice and the finality of Pike’s impending execution compel the entry of a short stay of execution in order to properly analyze the parties’ fully briefed arguments and resolve the issues on the merits.”
The court is deciding if Pike can reopen a court proceeding. She has said she was sexually abused as a child. Her legal counsel believes had the jury known, her sentence may have been different.
Had the court not stepped in, the 50-year-old Pike would have been Tennessee’s first woman to die by lethal injection. The last death penalty carried out on a woman was Martin Eve in 1820, and that was by hanging.
According to testimony and prosecutors, Pike was 18 in 1995 when 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer was killed. Prosecutors say Pike and two accomplices tortured, slashed and fatally beat her at the University of Tennessee. All were part of a Job Corps training program.
A pentagram was carved into Slemmer’s chest. Investigators say Pike bragged of keeping a skull fragment as a “souvenir.”
She was also convicted of attempted murder in 2001 after trying to strangle another prisoner with a shoestring.
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