US appeals court halts Tennessee execution of Christa Pike

What the report says

A federal appeals court has temporarily blocked Tennessee from carrying out the execution of Christa Pike, a death row inmate scheduled to die by lethal injection at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. According to Al Jazeera and Reuters, the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals issued a short stay less than two hours before the execution was due to proceed, while judges review Pike’s claim that evidence of childhood sexual abuse was not properly considered at sentencing.

Pike, 50, was convicted in connection with the 1995 killing of Colleen Slemmer, a 19-year-old classmate at a Knoxville vocational centre. The report says Pike was 18 at the time of the crime, and that her then-boyfriend and another teenager were also involved. Her lawyers have argued that her background included violence, neglect and sexual abuse, along with later diagnoses of bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, and they have sought to have her sentence reduced to life without parole.

Tennessee officials asked the US Supreme Court to lift the stay. Governor Bill Lee has rejected clemency, while Slemmer’s mother has supported the execution, the article says. Al Jazeera also notes that a group of UN human rights experts had urged that Pike’s sentence be commuted. If carried out, the execution would have made Pike the first woman executed by Tennessee in more than 200 years and one of very few women executed in the US since capital punishment resumed in 1976.