US Supreme Court Allows Execution of Christa Pike to Proceed

The US Supreme Court has permitted the execution of Christa Pike, marking her as the first woman to be executed in Tennessee in over 200 years. The justices overturned a last-minute reprieve granted by an appeals court on Wednesday morning, shortly before Pike, 50, was scheduled to be executed. Tennessee's attorney general requested the Supreme Court to reverse the lower court's decision. Pike was sentenced to death in 1996 for the murder of Colleen Slemmer, whom she and her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, killed when Pike was 18 years old. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh granted the application to vacate the stay of execution without providing an explanation. The court's three liberal justices—Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson—dissented, with Sotomayor stating that the decision allowed Tennessee to execute Pike before her legal challenges could be fully considered. The Supreme Court's ruling came just before 18:00 local time, with the execution order set to expire at midnight. If the deadline passes, the Tennessee Supreme Court would need to establish a new execution date. Earlier on Wednesday, the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit had paused the execution to review arguments in Pike's case. Pike's legal team argued that the state had previously claimed she lied about being sexually abused as a child, but at a recent hearing, the state acknowledged her history of sexual abuse. Pike's lawyers requested the appeals court to return her motion to the district court, asserting that the federal courts' ruling was influenced by the state's earlier claims. This was the second time in two days that the Supreme Court allowed Pike's execution by lethal injection to proceed, following the rejection of a different appeal on Tuesday. Additionally, Tennessee's governor denied a clemency request from Pike this week.