A federal appeals court halted the execution of Christa Gail Pike around an hour before it was scheduled to start on Sept. 30 at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tennessee.
The scheduled lethal injection would have made Pike, 50, the first woman in Tennessee to be executed in at least 200 years.
But the 10:00 a.m. execution was paused on Wednesday after a federal appeals court requested more time to determine whether Pike’s history of childhood sexual abuse was fully presented when a jury returned a guilty verdict and she was sentenced to death in 1996.
Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti asked the U.S. Supreme Court to lift a last-minute Sixth Circuit stay and allow the state to carry out Pike’s execution on Wednesday.
“We will continue to advocate for the lawfully-imposed sentence as the courts work through this technical issue,” the Tennessee Attorney General’s Office wrote in an email to The Epoch Times on Sept. 30.
“It is common in capital cases for the defense to raise last-minute objections following decades of litigation in numerous courts. We are asking the Supreme Court of the United States to lift the stay.”
The Epoch Times contacted Pike’s attorney, Stephen Ferrell, for comment but did not hear back by publication time.
Pike was 18 when she and her then-boyfriend were convicted of stabbing and beating their 19-year-old classmate, Colleen Slemmer, after luring her from a Knoxville job-training program in 1995.
The gruesome murder gained a lot of media attention because Slemmer was found with a pentagram carved on her body.
Christa Pike cries after being sentenced to death, in Knoxville, Tenn., on March 30, 1996. (WBIR-TV via AP)
Prosecutors suspected Pike thought Slemmer was trying to take her boyfriend, a claim Slemmer’s friends denied.
Pike is the only female inmate on Tennessee’s death row.
Abraham Bonowitz speaks during a March 4 Mercy protest against the death penalty at the Tennessee Capitol in Nashville on Sept. 27, 2026. The protest was ahead of the Sept. 30 scheduled execution of Christa Pike. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)
In the days leading up to the now-paused execution, the Tennessee Supreme Court denied a stay of execution on Sept. 23; Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, refused a clemency request on Sept. 28; and the U.S. Supreme Court denied the reprieve on Sept. 29 in an unsigned order with no justices dissenting.
