Christa Pike appeal: 3 courts, 1 shocking day of legal fight
The Christa Pike appeal moved through three courts in a single day, and the legal fight is not over. Tennessee’s attempt to execute Pike failed Wednesday night, Sept. 30, hours after the U.S. Supreme Court lifted a last-minute stay, and her lawyers responded with new emergency motions in state and federal courts, The Associated Press reported.
Pike, 50, was convicted of the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer, 19, in Knoxville. Prosecutors said she lured Slemmer to a wooded area on Jan. 12, 1995, cut her with a box cutter and beat her with a chunk of asphalt, according to the AP. Pike was 18 at the time. She was scheduled to become the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.
How the 6th Circuit stay unfolded
The first turn in the Christa Pike appeal came about an hour before her scheduled 10 a.m. execution at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, when a three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals voted 2-1 to stop it, the AP reported. Judge Jane Stranch granted the emergency stay, CBS News reported.
The panel wanted time to review whether Pike’s allegations of childhood sexual abuse were fully considered when she was sentenced in 1996. The court said it needed more time to “adequately address and resolve the issues,” Tennessee Lookout reported.
At the heart of the Christa Pike appeal is the claim that her original defense team did not adequately present that abuse at trial, her lawyers have argued. Assistant Federal Defender Stephen Ferrell also argued her death sentence is an outlier because other Tennessee defendants who were 18 at the time of their crimes have had death sentences vacated, according to the AP.
Supreme Court lifts the stay
Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti’s office asked the Supreme Court to cut the Christa Pike appeal short. The state argued that the last-minute halt traumatized Slemmer’s family and rewarded “abusive delay tactics” by Pike’s lawyers, the AP reported.
Wednesday evening, the court’s conservative majority vacated the stay without explanation. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.
“I see no reason to short-circuit the ordinary process of appellate review, particularly in light of the grave consequences of an erroneous decision,” Sotomayor wrote, according to Tennessee Lookout.
New Christa Pike appeal after the failed execution
Officials gave Pike two doses of pentobarbital, but she was still alive and loudly snoring when media witnesses were led out at 8:53 p.m., the AP reported. She was taken by ambulance to a hospital. Her lawyers said they had not been told about her condition.
Late Wednesday, her attorneys asked the Tennessee Supreme Court to immediately halt the execution, arguing she was in “unnecessary agony” in violation of her right to be free of cruel and unusual punishment. They filed similar motions with the 6th Circuit and a federal district court, according to the AP. Those filings open a new phase of the Christa Pike appeal.
“Tonight the State of Tennessee once again failed to carry out a lawful execution,” Pike’s legal team said in a statement reported by CBS News.
Gov. Bill Lee ordered “a comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred” and said the state’s one remaining execution scheduled for 2026 will not take place this year. The Tennessee Department of Correction said it “followed every step” of the state’s approved protocol.
What’s next in the Christa Pike appeal
The AP’s latest report, updated early Thursday, Oct. 1, did not say whether any court had ruled on the new motions. Robin M. Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, told the AP that Pike’s survival after receiving the drugs is “singular and unparalleled.”
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