By Theodore Brown-
The execution of Tennessee inmate Christa Pike has been halted an hour before it was due to happen, in an incredible development in this gripping saga. Pike was due to be executed in Tennessee on Wednesday, more than three decades after she was sentenced to death for the murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer.
Pike had been set to become the first woman executed by Tennessee in more than 200 years, and the first person executed in the state’s modern death-penalty era for a crime committed at the age of 1 Pike, now 50, has spent most of her adult life in prison. Her final attempts to stop the execution had failed after governor Bill Lee rejected her clemency request on September 28, saying he would uphold the state’s sentence, and the U.S. Supreme Court subsequently declined to grant a stay. Governor Lee, appears to have been defiant in providing no explanation for his official position, notwithstanding the numerous applications from different organisations like Amnesty International. However, the last minute potential intervention could be a game changer in this case.
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In their ruling on Wednesday, judges from the Sixth Circuit Appeals court said they needed more time to consider the arguments in Pike’s case. It is not known how much time the court will need to make its decision. The court’s docket records Pike’s September 25 application for a stay and shows that the case reached the Supreme Court in the final days before the scheduled execution. Pike’s legal team reportedly asked the appeals court to send her motion back to the district court, arguing that if the federal courts based their ruling on the state’s earlier claim that she was lying, then the federal review was affected.
The case began on January 12, 1995, when Pike was 18. Prosecutors said she, her then-boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp, who was 17, and another young woman lured Slemmer, a fellow student at a Knoxville Job Corps programme, into a wooded area. Pike and Shipp were subsequently convicted of first-degree murder.
The killing was exceptionally violent. Prosecutors said Slemmer was beaten and stabbed during the attack and that a pentagram was carved into her body. The brutality of the crime, combined with the ages of those involved, brought national attention to the case. Pike was sentenced to death in 1996. Shipp, because he was 17 when the murder occurred, was legally ineligible for the death penalty and received a life sentence. A third participant, Shadolla Peterson, who was 18, cooperated with prosecutors and received probation, according to reporting on the case. That disparity remains one of the central issues surrounding Pike’s sentence.
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Her lawyers have argued that the woman facing execution today cannot be understood solely through the actions of the 18-year-old who committed the crime. They have pointed to a childhood marked by repeated sexual abuse, neglect and trauma, as well as mental-health difficulties including bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. Those arguments formed a major part of her clemency request. More than 100 women’s advocacy organisations and sexual-abuse experts also supported calls for clemency, arguing that Pike’s history of sexual violence made the process of execution particularly traumatic and potentially raised constitutional questions about cruel and unusual punishment.
Her lawyers have additionally argued that an 18-year-old has a different level of neurological and emotional development from an adult who has spent decades incarcerated. They have pointed to the fact that Tennessee has rarely imposed death sentences on defendants who were 18 when their crimes were committed and argued that Pike’s case should be reconsidered in light of what is now known about adolescent development. Pike’s defence has also raised questions about Tennessee’s lethal-injection procedures and her physical and psychological circumstances. Those arguments provide the principal case for delaying or commuting the execution. The defence is not asking that Pike be released from prison. Instead, her lawyers have sought to have her death sentence changed to life imprisonment, allowing her to remain incarcerated for the rest of her life.
There is also a broader argument about the purpose of a capital sentence. Pike was 18 when she committed the crime but is now 50. Supporters of clemency argue that the person facing execution has undergone decades of imprisonment, treatment and rehabilitation and that the state should take account of the substantial difference between the young offender who committed the crime and the older prisoner who now faces execution. Pike herself has expressed remorse for Slemmer’s death. In her clemency petition, she acknowledged that she took the life of another person’s child, sister and friend and and subsequent rehabilitation do not erase the responsibility established by her conviction. The described the crime as something that continues to sicken her.
But the case for allowing the sentence to proceed rests on a fundamentally different principle. Slemmer was 19 when she was killed. Her mother, May Martinez, has spent more than 30 years living with the consequences of her daughter’s murder and has supported Pike’s execution. Martinez has said she wants to see the sentence carried out and has emphasised that Slemmer should not disappear from public memory beneath the focus on Pike . Supporters of the sentence do not consider Pike’s childhood trauma and subsequent rehabilitation, as erasing the responsibility established by her conviction. The Tennessee authorities have argued that her history of abuse and mental-health difficulties, while tragic, does not justify overturning a death sentence imposed after a jury considered the case and which has subsequently undergone extensive judicial review.
The state has therefore maintained that the question is not whether Pike experienced terrible circumstances, but whether those circumstances legally require the sentence imposed for Slemmer’s murder to be changed. The courts had up until now answered that question in the state’s favour. Pike’s legal team pursued arguments through the Tennessee courts and ultimately asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene. The Supreme Court declined to stay the execution. Its docket records the emergency application and the litigation that preceded it.
That does not mean the Supreme Court declared that every argument raised by Pike was without merit. A request for a stay is an application to prevent an execution while legal proceedings continue; the Court’s refusal means that the execution is not being halted on the basis of the application before it. The governor’s clemency decision is separate from the courts. Clemency gives an executive the ability, in appropriate circumstances, to reduce or commute a sentence even after the courts have upheld it. Governor Lee chose not to exercise that power in Pike’s case, but the latest development in the courts could change that.
The pause inevitably opens the door to the case to turn on its head’ providing Pike with a strong last minute window of hope in what has no doubt been a very difficult and challenging period for her. The stress she is suffering is the consequences of her past transgressions, but what the courts now need to objectively assess is whether the brutal act of murder she committed 32 years ago can reasonably be mitigated by the cruel set of experiences of rape she herself suffered in the hands of evil sexual predators in her childhood and formative yearss.
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