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The US Supreme Court vacated the stay issued earlier that morning by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals enabling Tennessee to carry out the lethal injection of Christa Pike at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville on September 30 2026. Pike 50 was pronounced dead following the procedure according to state officials after the high court sided with an emergency application from the Tennessee attorney general’s office. Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented from the ruling joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson writing that the decision interfered with the lower court’s routine handling of the case and prevented full consideration of Pike’s claims before the execution took place.
According to court records from her 1996 trial Pike was 18 when she participated in the 1995 torture and murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer a fellow student at a Knoxville job training facility. Pike her boyfriend and an accomplice lured Slemmer to an abandoned steam plant where the victim was beaten kicked stabbed repeatedly and had a pentagram carved into her chest during an assault that lasted up to an hour the Tennessean reported. The crime drew significant attention at the time amid concerns over occult activity although a later clarification from BBC News noted that the pentagram was not necessarily evidence of a Satanic ritual.
Pike’s attorneys had argued in last-minute filings that her jury never fully heard evidence of the extreme sexual abuse and rape she endured as a child which began before preschool and contributed to a PTSD diagnosis that would make the execution process itself traumatic. They told the courts that the involvement of male executioners would trigger flashbacks causing her to relive past assaults in a manner that raised constitutional questions about cruel and unusual punishment. A Fox News summary of the legal proceedings indicated that the Sixth Circuit’s 2-1 vote for a stay was intended to permit review of these issues until the Supreme Court intervened.
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee rejected a clemency petition from Pike on September 28 without offering a public explanation for his decision. Amnesty International and more than 100 groups advocating for women and survivors of sexual abuse had called on the governor to intervene with Justin Mazzola deputy director of research at Amnesty International USA stating in a released announcement “It is unthinkable that Governor Lee would even consider moving forward with this execution.” The attorney general’s office countered in its Supreme Court filing that Pike had benefited from decades of appeals and that additional delays only compounded the grief of Slemmer’s family who had waited more than 30 years.
Death Penalty Information Center figures show that 18 women have been executed in the United States since 1976 compared with more than 1 600 men. Pike’s execution marks the first time Tennessee has carried out such a sentence against a woman since 1819 and the first instance of the state executing someone for a crime committed at age 18 in the modern capital punishment era according to a Death Penalty Information Center assessment. The case had progressed through numerous state and federal reviews since Pike’s conviction with all avenues for relief ultimately exhausted prior to the September 30 date.
