A federal appeals court stopped Christa Pike’s execution about an hour before it was set to happen Wednesday morning. By evening the Supreme Court had wiped that order away. Tennessee can now put her to death, and the appeals court never got to finish looking at the claim that her trial lawyers failed her.
What she did
In 1995, Pike was 18 and enrolled in the Job Corps program in Knoxville. She and two others led Colleen Slemmer, a 19-year-old classmate, into the woods. They beat her and slashed her. Someone carved a pentagram into her chest. Pike kept a fragment of her skull as a souvenir.
She was convicted of first-degree murder. She is now 50, and has spent more than three decades on death row, the only woman there.
What did the Supreme Court do?
Update, Wednesday evening. The U.S. Supreme Court granted Tennessee’s emergency application and vacated the stay. The execution can go ahead.
- The majority order was brief, gave no reasoning, and did not decide the merits of Pike’s underlying claim.
- Tennessee’s argument was procedural: that Pike waited until the eve of her execution date to seek relief.
- Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Sotomayor’s objection was that the Court was letting Tennessee proceed before the Sixth Circuit had finished considering a claim it had already decided was worth examining.
As of this writing we have no confirmation that the execution has been carried out. What is confirmed is that the legal obstacle is gone.
The stay
Update, Wednesday. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals granted a stay roughly an hour before Pike was scheduled to be put to death at 10 a.m. Central at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.
- The vote was 2 to 1. Judges Karen Moore and Jane Stranch granted the stay. Judge Richard Griffin dissented.
- The stay ran until further order of the court. The Supreme Court vacated it the same evening.
- Tennessee has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to vacate it, arguing the appeals court acted without establishing that Pike is likely to win.
- That application was granted.
- This is a separate matter from the Supreme Court’s denial of Pike’s own application on Tuesday, issued without explanation. A lot of coverage is running the two together.
What the state admitted
The claim is ineffective assistance of counsel: that the lawyers who defended Pike at trial failed to put her history of childhood abuse properly in front of the jury that sentenced her. The Sixth Circuit said it needed a short pause to resolve the fully briefed arguments on the merits.
What makes that claim newly viable is the state’s own position shifting underneath it.
Pike’s lawyers have argued for years that she was raped and abused as a child, and that the jury never properly weighed it. Prosecutors previously argued she was lying about her past.
Tennessee has now conceded that the abuse happened. The court found that concession undercuts the findings earlier courts relied on when they rejected her appeals, which is why it wants time to look again.
So the argument is not that Pike is innocent. Nobody claims that. It is that the jury never properly heard the abuse history, and that the state won earlier rounds partly by disputing something it now admits was true.
Why does she want a firing squad?
This is the other track running alongside the abuse claim, and it is unusual enough to explain.
Pike has asked to be executed by an all-female firing squad rather than by lethal injection.
- She says lethal injection risks triggering flashbacks tied to the childhood sexual abuse.
- Her lawyers say she has small veins and a blood condition that could make placing an IV line difficult, raising the risk of a prolonged and painful death. The state disputes that.
- The Tennessee Supreme Court rejected the related Eighth Amendment claim, agreeing with a court-appointed special master that the medical argument had not been established.
Requesting a firing squad sounds extreme until you read the reason. It is a request for a method that does not require finding a vein.
Where does the case stand?
- Gov. Bill Lee denied clemency on Monday, saying he reached the decision after deliberate consideration.
- The execution had been set for 10 a.m. Central Wednesday at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, by lethal injection. It is now stayed.
- The Tennessee Department of Correction says Pike has refused a last meal.
Her lawyers have argued that she was sexually abused starting in early childhood, that she has untreated mental illness and brain damage, and that she was 18 at the time. They also argued that being restrained for lethal injection would cause her severe mental suffering given that history.
Pike wrote that she is at peace.
I am not afraid to die. I’m only nervous about the process.
Christa Pike
Colleen Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, plans to attend with a photograph of her daughter, and has said she will watch Pike get hooked up to a needle and go to sleep.
That stay lasted about eight hours.
The age question
Worth explaining, because it is the legal heart of the case and it is one number wide.
The Supreme Court ruled in Roper v. Simmons in 2005 that executing someone for a crime committed under 18 is unconstitutional. Pike was 18.
Courts have repeatedly declined to extend that line upward, even as the neuroscience it rested on, that the parts of the brain governing impulse control and consequence keep developing into the mid-twenties, applies no differently to an 18-year-old than a 17-year-old. The cutoff is a legal convenience, not a biological one.
The BeezLoop Take
What Pike did to Colleen Slemmer is as bad as this gets. Any argument against this execution has to start there rather than around it, and the arguments that skip the pentagram and the skull fragment are not serious arguments.
The Supreme Court did not say Pike’s claim is wrong. It said, in effect, that she raised it too late. Those are different findings and only one of them is about whether a jury heard the truth. A court can be entirely correct that a filing was untimely and the person can still have been sentenced by a jury that never learned she was raped as a small child. The procedural answer disposes of the case. It does not answer the question.
The concession is the thing to hold onto now.
For years Tennessee told courts that Pike was lying about being raped as a small child, and courts relied on that in rejecting her appeals. The state has now admitted it was true. Whatever happens at the Supreme Court this week, the state got rulings by disputing a fact it no longer disputes, and there is no process anywhere that goes back and reopens the decisions built on it.And the case against executing her does not depend on minimizing any of it. She was eighteen years and some months old, with a documented history of sexual abuse beginning in toddlerhood and untreated mental illness, which is the biography of a person the state failed comprehensively before she ever hurt anyone. Tennessee did not intervene when she was eight. It is intervening now, at 10 a.m., with a needle. That sequence should bother people regardless of where they land on capital punishment.
The Roper line is the part that should bother even supporters of the death penalty. The Supreme Court accepted that an adolescent brain is not a fully formed one, then drew the boundary at a birthday because a court needs a rule. Pike crossed it by months. If the reasoning was sound, the line is arbitrary; if the line is right, the reasoning was never about brain development at all. Executing someone for what they did weeks past their eighteenth birthday is the place that contradiction becomes a person.
We would resist the framing that makes this about her being a woman, which is why most outlets are covering it. First in 200 years is a striking fact and it is not a moral one. Tennessee executing a woman is neither better nor worse than Tennessee executing a man, and the reason this case is being watched should be the age at offense and the abuse record, not the novelty.
The refused last meal is the detail that will stick, and it is worth not over-reading. It is not a statement anyone has explained. A person who says she is at peace and only nervous about the process declining to eat is, most likely, a person who is not hungry.
What does Tennessee owe a child it knew was being abused, thirty-five years later?
If the Supreme Court accepts that an adolescent brain is not a finished one, what makes an eighteenth birthday the point where the state can kill you for what it did? And what does Tennessee owe a child it knew was being abused, thirty-five years later?
Related: a San Diego jury convicted a man of murder without a body.
Sources: NBC News · The Washington Post · WKRN · Tennessee Department of Correction
