Execution of US murderer Christa Pike halted an hour before it was due to happen
Pike was convicted and sentenced to death in 1996 for the murder of Colleen Slemmer.
The execution of Tennessee inmate Christa Pike was stopped an hour before it was scheduled to take place.
If carried out, Pike would become the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.
Pike, 50, has been on death row since she was convicted and sentenced to death in 1996 for killing Colleen Slemmer.
On Wednesday, judges on the Sixth Circuit Appeals court said they needed additional time to weigh the arguments in Pike’s case. It is not yet known how long the delay will last.
The decision follows the US Supreme Court’s refusal to grant a reprieve and Tennessee Governor’s earlier decision this week to deny Pike’s clemency request.
Her lawyers said Tennessee had spent years telling courts that Pike lied about being sexually abused as a child.
However, at a recent hearing on her execution method, the state said it does not dispute that she experienced sexual abuse and rape.
Pike’s legal team asked the appeals court to return her motion to the district court, saying that if the federal courts relied on the state’s earlier assertion that she was lying, then the federal review was tainted.
Pike was 18 when she and her then-boyfriend beat, tortured and murdered Colleen Slemmer, a 19-year-old they met at a job training camp for troubled teens.
The killing sparked a media frenzy in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1995, after the teenager was found with a pentagram — a symbol linked to satanic groups — carved into her chest. Pike has denied carving the pentagram herself.
She said Slemmer had insulted her and tried to steal her boyfriend. Two other residents at the camp later testified that Pike boasted about the murder before and after it happened, and showed them a piece of Slemmer’s skull.
Her attorneys have argued that “an 18-year-old brain is not an adult brain” and that Pike was too young at the time of the murder to receive a death sentence for it.
At the time she was incarcerated, Pike was the youngest person on death row, according to the Tennessee Department of Corrections.