A federal appeals court stopped Christa Pike’s lethal injection one hour before she was set to die in Tennessee, leaving the family of her tortured victim waiting again after nearly three decades.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit issued a stay around 9 a.m. CT Wednesday, roughly one hour before Pike’s planned 10 a.m. CT execution at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution. Witnesses and media had already gathered at the jail when the order came down.
Pike, convicted at 18 for the 1995 torture-murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in Knoxville, would have been the first woman executed by Tennessee in more than 200 years. Governor Bill Lee had denied clemency. The U.S. Supreme Court had already declined to stop the execution. Then a last-minute filing shifted the schedule.
Daily Mail reporting described the pause as indefinite in practical effect while the court reviews a sentencing argument tied to childhood sexual abuse claims. The Tennessee Attorney General’s Office moved quickly to ask the Supreme Court to lift it and called the ruling a “technical issue.”
First papers landed on the docket around 7:20 p.m. Tuesday, about 12 hours before the stay. Another 171 pages followed. Judge Jane Branstetter Stranch labeled her order a “short stay of execution” while the court examines whether childhood sexual abuse was weighed when Pike was first sentenced.
Stephen Ferrell of the Federal Defenders Services of Eastern Tennessee said “serious concerns” had halted the planned lethal injection. Pike’s legal team had also pressed Eighth Amendment claims, arguing that a male execution team would raise the risk of pain and suffering given her reported history of abuse and PTSD.
In a statement to Fox 17, her lawyers said moving ahead would put Tennessee “on singular footing,” and that she would be the first person the state executes in the modern death-penalty era who was a teenager at the time of the crime, and the first woman executed there in more than 200 years.
Just The News reported the Sixth Circuit stayed the execution “until further order of this court,” citing new arguments about a traumatic childhood that included multiple sexual assaults. Pike is now 50. The victim, Colleen Slemmer, was 19.
Pike and her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, lured Slemmer, a Knoxville Job Corps student, into a wooded area. They stabbed and beat her. A pentagram was carved into her chest. Something was carved into her head. Investigators said Pike took a piece of the skull as a souvenir. Pike herself estimated the torture lasted about 30 minutes to an hour. Slemmer tried to run.
Shadolla Peterson, then 18, helped lure the victim and stood lookout. Peterson later testified to seeing Pike carve into Slemmer’s head and received probation in exchange for cooperation. Shipp was convicted of first-degree murder and got life with the possibility of parole. Pike received death.
The murder came almost one year to the day after Pike was allegedly raped by a stranger at 17, according to material cited in the case history. The Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide has described a longer record of abuse, including when she was two, multiple rapes, and a suicide attempt at 12. Those claims are now central to the stay fight. They do not erase what was done to Colleen Slemmer.
In the run-up to the date, Pike’s team sought alternative methods. Earlier this month, and in one account, about a week before the scheduled execution, she asked for an all-female firing squad, citing abuse-related trauma and the risk of an Eighth Amendment violation if men carried out a lethal injection. In August she had asked a court to consider hanging. She had also once sought to avoid lethal injection on Buddhist grounds.
Hours before the planned execution, the Tennessee Department of Correction said she refused a last meal. The state still planned to provide one. Inmates are typically given $20 for that meal.
Governor Bill Lee’s clemency denial left the legal path as the only remaining brake. Pike’s lawyers said they were “deeply saddened and heartbroken” by the governor’s decision. The Supreme Court had already turned aside a bid to stop the execution before the Sixth Circuit stepped in.
May Martinez, Slemmer’s mother, had said she wanted a front-row seat to watch her daughter’s killer die. She was among those at the jail when the stay landed. Travel costs nearly kept the family away; a GoFundMe push covered the trip. An update on the fundraiser thanked donors who “stepped up, donated, shared, prayed,” and said the help made sure they “could be there for Colleen.”
Instead of an execution, they got another court order. The attorney general’s office is asking the Supreme Court to clear the path again. How long Judge Stranch’s “short stay” lasts remains unclear from the public descriptions of the order.
Finality in capital cases is supposed to mean something after a jury’s verdict, a death sentence, clemency review, and higher-court refusals to intervene. Here, a filing wave that began the evening before still stopped the clock with witnesses already on site.
Colleen Slemmer’s family has lived with the crime’s details for roughly 30 years. Pike’s conviction has stood since March 1996. The dispute now centers on what the sentencing court weighed about her childhood, not on whether she joined in carving up a 19-year-old in the woods.
Justice delayed at the death house is still justice denied for the people who buried a tortured daughter, and Tennessee’s duty is to finish lawful sentences without endless last-hour resets.
