Supreme Court clears way for Christa Pike execution in Tennessee

Three liberal justices dissented from order vacating stay

The US Supreme Court on Wednesday evening cleared the way for Tennessee to execute death-row inmate Christa Pike, vacating a last-minute stay issued hours earlier by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. Justice Brett Kavanaugh granted the state’s application to lift the stay, according to BBC News. No explanation accompanied the order.

The court’s three liberal justices — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — dissented. Sotomayor wrote that she dissented because the decision allowed Tennessee to execute Pike before her pending legal challenges to her conviction “can be properly considered.”

“Tennessee’s desire to expedite Pike’s execution by a few days or even weeks cannot outweigh her ‘fundamental interest in [her] own life,’” Sotomayor wrote.

Pike, 50, has been awaiting execution since she was convicted and sentenced to death in 1996 for the murder of Colleen Slemmer. If the execution proceeds, she would be the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years, according to BBC News. It was not immediately clear when the execution would take place.

The lethal injection had been scheduled for Wednesday morning before Sixth Circuit judges halted it, saying they needed more time to consider the arguments in Pike’s case. Tennessee’s attorney general immediately requested that the Supreme Court overrule the lower court’s stay.

The underlying dispute centers on a shift in the state’s litigation position. Pike’s lawyers said that for years, Tennessee argued in court that Pike had lied about being sexually abused as a child. But at a recent hearing about her execution method, the state said it did not dispute that she suffered sexual abuse and rape.

Pike’s legal team asked the appeals court to send her motion back to the district court, arguing that if federal courts based their ruling on the state’s earlier claim that she was lying, then the federal review was affected.

Earlier this week, the Supreme Court refused to hear a different appeal from Pike. The Tennessee governor also denied a clemency request.

Pike was 18 when she and her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, beat, tortured and murdered Slemmer, a 19-year-old they met at a job training camp for troubled teens, according to BBC News.