The Supreme Court on Wednesday evening said Tennessee can move forward with the execution of 50-year-old Christa Pike, lifting a last-minute stay imposed by a lower court.
The decision appears to extinguish the last possible reprieve for Pike, who as an 18-year-old helped carry out a brutal murder of fellow teen Colleen Slemmer in Knoxville in 1995.
Wednesday’s decision ends a feverish effort in recent months to spare Pike, who is set to become the first woman put to death by the state in more than 200 years.
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. Then, early Wednesday, 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. Tennessee immediately asked the Supreme Court to overturn that stay and the court agreed.
The court’s three liberal justices dissented.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor, with Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson joining, chastised the high court for interceding in the 6th Circuit’s “routine administrative handling of a capital case” and wrote that it “unnecessarily prevents that court from giving due consideration to Pike’s claim.”
“Worse, the Court grants such extraordinary relief solely to allow the State to execute Pike before litigation over her conviction has properly run its course in the lower courts,” Sotomayor wrote. “I see no reason to shortcircuit the ordinary process of appellate review, particularly in light of the grave consequences of an erroneous decision.”
In seeking to push forward with the execution, Tennessee officials had written in a petition to the Supreme Court that further delay amounted to only more harm for the family of Slemmer, who was beaten, tortured and repeatedly slashed with a knife on a long-ago January night in Knoxville.
“Slemmer’s mother and stepfather, May and Raul Martinez, have traveled to Tennessee for Pike’s execution,” the state’s petition to vacate the stay read. “It is far past time for Colleen’s family to receive the closure they seek.”
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On a January 1995 night, 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.
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.
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 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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