The US Supreme Court has cleared the way for Tennessee inmate Christa Pike to be executed, overturning a last‑minute reprieve.
The lethal‑injection killing was scheduled for Wednesday morning after the Sixth Circuit Appeals Court halted the execution. Tennessee’s attorney general then petitioned the Supreme Court to reverse that stay.
Pike, 50, has been awaiting execution since her 1996 conviction and death sentence for the brutal murder of 19‑year‑old Colleen Slemmer. If carried out, she will become the first woman executed in Tennessee in over two hundred years.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh granted the application to vacate the stay, with no explanation given. The three liberal justices – Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson – dissented, arguing that the state could not expedite Pike’s execution ahead of her pending legal challenges.
The stay was revoked just before 6 p.m. local time, hours before the state’s execution order would have expired at midnight. If the deadline passes, the Tennessee Supreme Court will need to set a new execution date.
Pike’s legal team has argued that the state’s earlier claims that she lied about a childhood sexual abuse were wrongful, especially after the state later admitted she was abused. The governor has also denied a clemency request this week.
Pike was 18 when she and her then‑boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, beat, tortured and murdered the victim in a setting tied to a job‑training camp for troubled teens.
