The order came on Wednesday. The U.S. Supreme Court had rejected an earlier last-minute request to stop the execution, and Tennessee’s attorney general later asked the Supreme Court to overturn the appeals court’s new stay. The appellate court did not say when it would finish considering Pike’s claim, leaving the immediate schedule uncertain.
Pike was 18 in January 1995 when she, her 17-year-old boyfriend and a third person lured 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a classmate at their Knoxville Job Corps centre, into a wooded area and killed her. Pike and her boyfriend confessed and were convicted of first-degree murder the following year. Pike received a death sentence; Tadaryl Shipp was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole. Their co-defendant, Shadolla Peterson, testified for the prosecution and received probation.
Pike’s lawyers sought to have her sentence commuted to life without parole. Their 226-page petition to Governor Bill Lee documented what they described as childhood violence, neglect and sexual abuse, and cited diagnoses of bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder made during her imprisonment. Lee denied clemency. Those claims are now part of the argument before the appeals court; the temporary stay itself does not overturn Pike’s conviction or sentence.
The planned execution would have been Tennessee’s first execution of a woman in more than two centuries. The Death Penalty Information Center says 18 women have been executed in the United States since capital punishment resumed in 1976, out of 1,683 people put to death. Tennessee had executed 17 people before Wednesday. The case has drawn international attention: U.N. human-rights experts called for Pike’s sentence to be commuted, while Slemmer’s mother publicly supported the execution. The appeals court must now decide how to address the defence argument about the sentencing record.