Christa Pike granted stay of execution

What the report says

A federal appeals court has temporarily stopped the execution of Tennessee death-row inmate Christa Pike, halting the process about an hour before it was scheduled to take place, according to BBC World News. Judges on the Sixth Circuit said they needed more time to weigh arguments in Pike’s case. The length of the delay is not yet known.

Pike, now 50, was convicted and sentenced to death in 1996 for the killing of Colleen Slemmer. BBC reported that Pike was 18 at the time of the murder, which took place after she and her then-boyfriend beat, tortured and killed Slemmer, a 19-year-old she met at a job-training camp for troubled teens near Knoxville, Tennessee. The article says the case drew major attention in Tennessee in the mid-1990s.

The pause came after the US Supreme Court declined to intervene and Tennessee’s governor rejected a clemency request earlier in the week. Pike’s legal team has argued that earlier state claims about her childhood abuse may have affected how federal courts reviewed her case. The state has recently said it does not dispute that she experienced sexual abuse and rape, BBC reported.

The case is significant because Pike would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years if the execution had gone ahead, and because her lawyers are also arguing that her age at the time of the crime should matter in sentencing.