An Hour Before the End, a Court Chose to Look Deeper

There is a particular weight that settles on a case when the state prepares to take a life—a weight that grows heavier when the person to be executed was barely an adult when the crime occurred, and when the question of what she suffered as a child has never been fully answered. On Wednesday morning in Nashville, that weight was lifted, at least temporarily, when a federal appeals court halted the execution of Christa Gail Pike about an hour before it was scheduled to proceed.

Pike, now 50, was convicted of the 1995 stabbing and beating death of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a classmate at a Knoxville job training facility. She was 18 at the time. Her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, was 17 and received a life sentence with the possibility of parole. Pike was the only one sentenced to death . She would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in at least 200 years .

The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals halted the execution on a 2-1 vote, seeking to review whether Pike's allegations of childhood sexual abuse and rape were fully considered at her sentencing . Pike's supporters argue that the state should weigh her age at the time, her diagnosed bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, and a history of severe abuse that included being raped from the time she was a toddler . Assistant Federal Defender Stephen Ferrell said Pike's death sentence is an outlier because other 18-year-olds in Tennessee have had such sentences vacated .

Pike does not deny the killing. In her clemency petition, she said she only wanted to fight Slemmer but killed her in a frenzied attack when she couldn't "put the brakes on." "I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid," she wrote. "It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I'd done. Even more to accept how many lives I affected. I took the life of someone's child, sister, friend. It sickens me now to think I had the ability to commit such a crime" .

The case drew national attention in the 1990s in part because a pentagram was carved on Slemmer's body, stoking fears of Satan worship during the "satanic panic" of that era. Prosecutors said Pike feared Slemmer was trying to steal her boyfriend and lured her to a wooded area, where she cut her with a box cutter and beat her with a chunk of asphalt. Shipp admitted to carving the pentagram .

Slemmer's mother, May Martinez, has waited decades for the sentence to be carried out. "Every time I think about it, I think about Colleen feeling that pain and trying to get up and run," she told the Associated Press . She noted that her daughter would have turned 51 earlier in September. "Not a day goes by, or a minute goes by that I do not think about Colleen. Holidays are the worst" .

Tennessee's attorney general immediately appealed the stay to the U.S. Supreme Court . The Supreme Court had denied Pike's earlier request for a halt, and Governor Bill Lee had declined clemency . Witnesses and media remained at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in case the high court allows the execution to proceed . Outside the prison, more than 30 people gathered, some wearing shirts that read "Love Heals" . For now, the case waits—suspended between a sentence and its execution, while a court decides whether the woman who committed the crime was fully seen when she was sentenced to die.

AI Image Disclaimer: The accompanying images in this report were created with artificial intelligence and are intended for conceptual representation only.

Sources: AP News, CNN, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, The Canadian Press, NOS