This morning, a federal appeals court paused the execution of Tennessee’s lone woman on death row about an hour before it was scheduled to be carried out.
In a last-minute decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth District said it needed to review claims that Christa Pike’s legal team made in a bid to stop her execution. At issue is whether Pike can reopen a court proceeding centered around her allegations that she was sexually abused beginning when she was a child, which the state acknowledged at a special hearing in August.
“The interests of justice and the finality of Pike’s impending execution compel the entry of a short stay of execution in order to properly analyze the parties’ fully briefed arguments and resolve the issues on the merits,” the court said.
It’s unclear how long the execution may be halted. It was scheduled for 10 a.m. local time in Nashville.
“The court has stayed this, recognizing the serious concerns about Christa’s scheduled execution,” said Stephen Ferrell of the Federal Defenders Services of Eastern Tennessee.
Both Gov. Bill Lee and the US Supreme Court had said they would not stop Pike’s execution.
Before learning Monday that Lee would not be intervening in her case, Pike, 50, wrote in a letter to NBC News, shared by her spiritual adviser: “Whether my clemency is granted or not, I am at peace.”
“I am not afraid to die,” wrote Pike, who has been on death row for more than three decades. “I’m only nervous about the process.”
Pike doesn’t dispute her role in the 1995 murder of a classmate. But details about her upbringing, marked by years of sexual and physical abuse and neglect, were not shared with the jury that sentenced her to death. Her lawyers believe that if such evidence of abuse were presented at a trial now, a death sentence would not be guaranteed. They had asked the Supreme Court to halt Pike’s execution, saying that she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from being molested and raped beginning when she was a toddler. Being held down and strapped to a gurney, they wrote, will likely create “severe mental suffering and superadded psychological terror under Tennessee’s lethal injection protocol.”
The state hasn’t denied that Pike has suffered from abuse. But in a response filed Monday, the attorney general’s office said a judge already concluded last month that it was “speculative whether Pike would suffer” greater mental harm from how the lethal injection protocol is carried out. The Supreme Court appeared to be Pike’s remaining chance for a reprieve after Lee said he was upholding her death sentence “after deliberate consideration.” SCOTUS denied her petition Tuesday evening.
