Supreme Court clears path for Christa Pike's execution in 6-3 ruling
The US Supreme Court has voted 6-3 to vacate a last-minute stay of execution for Christa Pike, clearing Tennessee to carry out the death sentence on Wednesday night.
The US Supreme Court has voted 6-3 to vacate a last-minute stay of execution for Christa Pike, clearing Tennessee to carry out the death sentence on Wednesday night.
The order came on the evening of 30 September, hours after a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit imposed a “short stay” less than two hours before Pike’s scheduled 10 a.m. Central Time lethal injection at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.
The three liberal justices — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — dissented. Writing for the dissenters, Sotomayor said the majority was interfering with the 6th Circuit’s “routine administrative handling of a capital case”, adding that the court is “a court of review, not of first view”.
The 6th Circuit stay, decided 2-1, had paused the execution so judges could consider Pike’s bid to reopen habeas proceedings after Tennessee conceded — for the first time — that she had been a victim of childhood sexual abuse.
The Tennessee Department of Correction told USA Today it planned to proceed with the execution on Wednesday night; the order permitted it as long as it took place before midnight local time. Whether the execution was carried out had not been confirmed by officials at the time of writing.
Pike, 50, was convicted of the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in Knoxville. If carried out, it would be the first execution of a woman in Tennessee in more than 200 years.
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