Hours before a Tennessee woman was set to be put to death Wednesday for her role in a brutal killing, a federal appeals court blocked the execution to allow more time to weigh whether the defendant’s history as a sexual abuse victim was properly considered in her case.
Christa Pike had been sentenced to death three decades ago for the murder of a classmate, Colleen Slemmer, a crime the woman committed when she was 18 years old.
In the lead-up to Pike’s scheduled execution, hundreds of legal advocates and trauma experts filed amicus briefs to the Tennessee and U.S. supreme courts and sent pleading letters to Gov. Bill Lee (R) asking for the state to commute her sentence to life in prison. They argued her age at the time of her crime and extensive history of sexual abuse as a child and teen should shape the severity of her punishment.
The governor rejected Pike’s clemency petition, and courts, including the Supreme Court, had declined to intervene.
But Wednesday morning, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit halted the execution for now. Tennessee immediately asked the Supreme Court to vacate the stay and allow the execution to move forward.
Pike “states that the State recently reversed its litigation position that she is a liar who fabricated sexual abuse,” the court wrote. “Pike contends that the State’s concession of her history of child sexual abuse and rape ‘erodes the foundation’ of her state court proceedings.”
“To adequately address and resolve the issues now presented to this court and in carefully balancing the equities, we find that a stay of Pike’s execution is necessary,” the court wrote. One judge dissented.
Pike’s execution would have come three decades after the January 1995 night when Pike and two other teens — her boyfriend and another girl — lured Slemmer into a wooded area in Knoxville then tortured and killed her. The teenagers knew each other through the Knoxville Job Corps, and prosecutors argued that Pike believed Slemmer was interested in her boyfriend.
According to court documents and trial testimony, Slemmer was beaten, tortured and repeatedly slashed with a knife. Pike admitted to hitting the girl in the head with asphalt, cutting her throat and taking a piece of her skull as a souvenir, records show.
Of the three teens present for the killing, Pike was the only one to be capitally charged. The boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, was ineligible for a death sentence because he was 17 years old. He was sentenced to life in prison and is now eligible for parole. The other teenage girl, Shadolla Peterson, testified against Pike and Shipp and received probation.
May Martinez, Slemmer’s mother, had traveled to Tennessee from Florida to watch the execution. “I want Colleen to be at rest, without having constant reminders,” Martinez said in an interview with WBIR Channel 10 ahead of the scheduled execution.
While incarcerated, Pike was also convicted of attempted first degree murder in an Aug. 24, 2001, assault on another inmate.
Recent months had seen a feverish push from death penalty opponents and Pike’s attorneys to spare her life.
In a 226-page clemency petition, her legal team detailed a childhood marked by neglect, sexual abuse and repeated failures of adults and the institutions intended to protect her from harm.
The trauma Pike suffered included repeated sexual assault at the hands of a family member’s boyfriend between ages 2 and 5, according to the petition. Attorneys detail how, at age 11, she was raped by a neighbor who was arrested and pleaded no contest to charges related to the case, only to serve no prison time.
At 17, according to the petition, Pike was again attacked, assaulted and raped by a stranger in North Carolina. The man was never identified or prosecuted.
Attorneys also detailed evidence that Pike’s mother drank heavily during her pregnancy, which they argue contributed to brain damage later linked to Pike’s diagnosis of bipolar disorder. These layers of traumas and mental illness, her attorneys argue, left her unable to “put the brakes on” when she confronted Slemmer behind a University of Tennessee agriculture campus steam plant that long-ago night.
Pike’s attorneys and legal advocates with expertise in trauma and sexual violence also have argued that the woman’s initial defense team did a subpar job of explaining her actions within the context of her own repeated abuse.
Amicus briefs by the Cornell School of Law on behalf of advocates of sexual trauma survivors were also filed before the Tennessee and U.S. supreme courts, writing plainly that they believe the likelihood Pike will “involuntarily relive her rapes during her execution is extremely high.”
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