Tennessee halts Christa Pike execution as court reviews abuse claims

A federal appeals court halted Christa Pike's execution in Tennessee just before it was due to begin. The pause has revived scrutiny of how her abuse history and youth were weighed at sentencing.Nashville,Sep 30, 2026 20:48 ISTTennessee halted the execution of Christa Gail Pike about an hour before it was due to begin on Wednesday after a federal appeals court said it wanted to review whether her claims of childhood sexual abuse and rape were fully considered when she was sentenced to death. Pike was 18 when she committed the 1995 murder.The case had drawn renewed attention because Pike, now 50, would have been the first woman executed by the state in at least 200 years. As the execution date approached, it also revived debate over the death penalty for young offenders.Pike and her boyfriend were convicted of stabbing and beating 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, their classmate at a job training facility in Knoxville, in 1995. Prosecutors said Pike, fearing Slemmer was trying to steal her boyfriend, lured her to a wooded area on January 12, 1995. Pike cut Slemmer with a box cutter and beat her with a large chunk of asphalt. Her boyfriend, Shipp, later admitted that he carved a pentagram, a star-shaped symbol associated with Satanism, into Slemmer's body.The killing drew widespread attention at the time because the pentagram and other details of the crime fed fears of Satan worship during the "satanic panic" of the 1980s and 1990s. Shipp was 17 when the crime took place and received a life sentence with the possibility of parole. Pike was the only one sentenced to death. Pike does not deny the killing, but her supporters have argued that the state should take into account her age at the time, her mental illness and a history of severe sexual abuse that they said included rape 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 sentenced to death in Tennessee have had their sentences vacated.The US Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected a request from Pike's lawyers to stop the execution, and Tennessee Governor Bill Lee denied her clemency on Monday. In a statement included in her clemency petition, Pike said, "I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid. 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." Slemmer's mother, May Martinez, said she wanted the lethal injection to go ahead and that she had waited decades to see Pike's sentence carried out. "Every time I think about it, I think about Colleen feeling that pain and trying to get up and run," Martinez said in a telephone interview. She said a group had helped raise money so she and her husband could travel from Florida to witness the execution.Execution witnesses had already gathered at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville when the court order was issued at around 9 am CDT. It was not immediately clear whether Tennessee's attorney general would appeal the decision or how long the delay would last.According to Robin M. Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, Tennessee has not executed a woman for at least 200 years, although older records are not complete. Across the US, 18 women have been executed since 1976, accounting for about 1 per cent of all executions. Missouri last year executed Amber McLaughlin for a 2003 killing, in what is believed to be the first execution of a transgender woman in the US. In 2021, the federal government executed Lisa Montgomery, the first time in nearly seven decades that it put a female inmate to death.For now, Pike's execution remains on hold while the federal appeals court examines whether the sentencing court fully considered her abuse allegations, delaying what would have been a rare execution of a woman in Tennessee while leaving her conviction in the 1995 killing of Colleen Slemmer unchanged.With PTI Inputs- Ends