Appeals Court Stops Rare Execution of Female Killer an Hour Before She Was to Be Put to Death in Tennessee

The first woman sentenced to death in Tennessee in more than 200 years was granted a stay by a federal appeals court just over an hour before her scheduled execution and after witnesses had gathered at the Nashville prison for the event.

Christa Pike, now 50, was slated to be executed by lethal injection at 10 a.m. central time Wednesday at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution for the torture and murder of a University of Tennessee classmate in 1995.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit temporarily halted the death sentence so it can review whether her claims of childhood sexual abuse and rape were presented and properly considered when she was sentenced, news outlets reported.

The order said that the “short stay of execution” was to last “until further order of this court,” according to news reports.

However, the Tennessee Attorney General’s Office told the New York Post that it has since asked the U.S. Supreme Court to “lift the stay.”

“We will continue to advocate for the lawfully-imposed sentence as the courts work through this technical issue,” a spokesman said.

The representative added, “It is common in capital cases for the defense to raise last minute objections following decades of litigation in numerous courts. We are asking the Supreme Court of the United States to lift the stay.”

Pike was convicted of killing her Jobs Corps classmate Colleen Slemmer, 19, in a jealous rage in January 1995 when she was 18 years old. Among the reasons stated for the homicide was her belief that the victim was trying to hook up with her boyfriend, prosecutors said.

Along with her 17-year-old boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp, Pike lured Slemmer to an isolated area of the University of Tennessee’s Knoxville campus where she beat the girl, slashed her throat, and carved Satanic symbols on her body while she pleaded for her life, according to reports of her trial.

“At the end of the horrific ordeal, which investigators said lasted at least 30 minutes, Pike murdered Slemmer by bashing her head in with a large chunk of asphalt and then kept a piece of her skull as a souvenir,” the Post reported.

Pike received a death sentence in the 1996 proceeding. Shipp was sentenced to life because he was a juvenile at the time of the homicide.

Pike’s lawyers in several attempts to stop the execution with the governor’s office and the courts have argued that she suffered severe sexual and physical abuse by men during her childhood and undiagnosed mental illnesses at the time of Slemmer’s murder.

In keeping with that claim, and as Breitbart News reported this week, Pike asked that her execution team be made up of all women so as not to be “traumatized” by having men involved in her final moments.

No evidence of the childhood sexual assaults, the first allegedly beginning at age two and continuing into her later childhood, had apparently been presented to the jury when she was on trial for the murder.

Pike’s 32-year stay on death row has not been without incident.

She had 25 years tacked on to her sentence after she was convicted of attempting to murder a fellow inmate by strangling her with a shoestring in 2001.

In 2012, a prison escape plot was prevented involving a corrections officer and a New Jersey personal trainer with whom the convicted killer had developed a relationship.

The last woman to be executed in Tennessee was Martin Eve, who was charged with being an accessory to murder and executed by hanging in 1820, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

 Breitbart contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the author of the New York Times true crime best seller House of Secrets and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.