Why Christa Pike was sentenced to death and why her case is controversial

The United States Supreme Court has ruled that the execution of Tennessee woman Christa Pike can proceed, overturning an eleventh-hour reprieve granted by a lower court.

The execution had been scheduled to take place on Wednesday morning (local time) for a murder the 50-year-old committed when she was 18.

About an hour before the lethal injection was scheduled to take place, a federal appeals court stopped the process until further notice to review whether Pike’s allegations of childhood sexual abuse had been fully considered when she was sentenced decades ago.

Witnesses had already gathered at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tennessee, when that decision arrived.

The state’s attorney-general swiftly appealed to the nation’s highest court, writing that the last-minute pause traumatised the victim’s family and rewarded “abusive delay tactics” by Pike’s lawyers.

The victim’s mother, May Martinez, said over the weekend she had waited decades for the sentence to be carried out, and wants it to proceed.

“Not a day goes by, or a minute goes by that I do not think about Colleen,” she told the Associated Press.

Within hours of the appeals court’s ruling, the conservative-majority Supreme Court cleared the path for the injection to move forward. The three liberal justices dissented.

What did Christa Pike do?

In 1995, Pike and her then-boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp beat and killed Colleen Slemmer, 19, at a job training camp for young people. Only Pike received the death penalty.

The killing gained national attention after Slemmer’s body was found with a pentagram, often seen as a satanic symbol, carved in her chest, stoking fears of Satan worship during the so-called “Satanic panic” of the 1980s and 1990s.

Prosecutors said Pike lured Slemmer to a wooded area, cut her with a box cutter and beat her with a large chunk of asphalt. Shipp admitted to carving the pentagram.

Shipp was 17 at the time and received a life sentence with the possibility of parole.

After the killing, Pike was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. In her clemency petition, she said she only wanted to fight Slemmer but killed her when she couldn’t “put the brakes on”.

“I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid. It took me numerous years to even realise the gravity of what I’d done. Even more to accept how many lives I affected. I took the life of someone’s child, sister, friend. It sickens me now to think I had the ability to commit such a crime,” Pike said in a statement.

Why has the case drawn international attention?

The case has sparked renewed debate over the death penalty for young offenders. Her lawyers, seeking clemency, have argued her age and mental health issues at the time of the murder should have been taken into account.

Other advocates opposing her death penalty have also argued that the state should consider Pike’s allegations of severe sexual abuse that included being raped from the time she was a toddler.

“It is inconceivable that in the 21st century, the criminal justice system is poised to execute a survivor of rape and child sexual abuse whose jury never had the opportunity to consider those facts in weighing the defendant’s moral culpability,” her lawyers wrote in a filing.

Independent United Nations rights experts have urged the US government and Tennessee authorities to halt Pike’s execution and commute her death sentence.

“Pike’s execution would mark the culmination of a trajectory of severe physical and psychological suffering marked by childhood abuse and nearly three decades of solitary confinement on death row,” a group of UN experts said in a joint statement.

Sonia Sotomayor, one of three liberal Supreme Court justices who dissented against the ruling that paved the way for the execution to proceed, said the decision was stunning and allows an execution to proceed before “still-pending legal challenges to [Pike’s] conviction can be properly considered”.

How often do US states carry out executions?

Tennessee has not executed a woman in more than 200 years, and it’s rare for women to be sentenced to death or executed across the US.

Since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, 18 women have been put to death in the US.

That makes up about 1 per cent of all executions, according to the US’ Death Penalty Information Center.

The most recent was in 2023, when Missouri executed Amber McLaughlin for a killing two decades earlier.

According to Amnesty International, capital punishment is on the rise globally. The rights group said 2,707 people were executed across 17 countries in 2025, the highest figure it has recorded since 1981.

Forty-seven men were executed in the US last year, almost double the number in 2024.

US President Donald Trump signed an executive order when he took office at the start of last year, affirming his support for capital punishment at the federal level as an “essential tool for deterring and punishing those who would commit the most heinous crimes and acts of lethal violence”.

Australia fully abolished capital punishment in 1985, when NSW became the last state or territory to end the practice.

— With reporting by Agence France-Presse and the Associated Press.

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