A last-minute court ruling has stopped Tennessee from executing Christa Pike by lethal injection, pausing a case that dates back three decades to the murder of a fellow student.
Pike had been scheduled to become the first woman executed by Tennessee in more than 200 years.
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The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a stay of execution until further notice shortly before Pike was due to die.
Governor Bill Lee rejected Pike’s clemency petition, which detailed her childhood trauma and sexual abuse. Had the execution gone ahead, Pike would have been the only person in the modern era of US capital punishment executed in Tennessee for a crime committed as a teenager.
Pike was 18 in January 1995 when she, her 17-year-old boyfriend and a third accomplice lured 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer into a wooded area near the Knoxville Job Corps vocational centre. There, they tortured and killed their classmate.
The brutality of the crime attracted intense media attention at the time.
Testimony at trial suggested Pike regarded Ms Slemmer as a rival for the affections of her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp.
The US Supreme Court yesterday rejected an 11th-hour bid for a stay of execution
Pike and Shipp confessed to the killing, and both were convicted of first-degree murder the following year.
Pike received a death sentence, while Shipp was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole.
Shadolla Peterson, their co-defendant, was 18 when the murder occurred and served as a lookout. She testified for the prosecution and was sentenced to probation.
According to the Tennessee Department of Correction, Pike, now the only woman on the state’s death row, was also convicted in August 2001 of attempted first-degree murder after assaulting another inmate.
In a 226-page petition urging the governor to replace her death sentence with life without the possibility of parole, Pike’s lawyers described years of violence, neglect and sexual abuse during her childhood. They said she was raped twice, at ages 11 and 17.
Her attorneys also cited prison diagnoses of bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.
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Teen who committed murder ‘no longer exists’
Pike’s lawyers also cited evidence that her mother drank heavily while pregnant, which they said contributed to impaired brain development and made it harder for Pike to control her impulses when she was young.
“The 18-year-old girl suffering from severe mental illness and near-debilitating trauma no longer exists,” her lawyers wrote after Mr Lee denied clemency.
“Christa is a 50-year-old remorseful woman who understands her actions, receives proper treatment for her mental illness, and provides for and guides fellow incarcerated women.”
Ms Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, has publicly supported carrying out the execution.
Pike’s clemency petition highlighting childhood trauma and sexual abuse was denied by Governor Bill Lee
Executions of women in US prisons remain extremely uncommon. Women account for only 18 of the 1,683 people executed since the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Before today, Tennessee had carried out 17 executions.
Pike’s case has attracted attention beyond the United States, including from a group of United Nations human rights experts who recently called for her death sentence to be commuted.
Experts on sexual violence and trauma have likewise urged authorities to spare her, warning that the lethal-injection process could trigger severe and traumatic flashbacks connected to her childhood sexual abuse and rape, intensifying the cruelty and suffering of the execution.
In May, Tennessee prison officials abandoned an attempt to execute a man convicted of murder after they were unable to locate a suitable vein for the lethal injection.
