In a high-states legal ruling that has reignited national debate over capital punishment, the U.S. Supreme Court has cleared the path for the execution of Christa Pike, a Tennessee death row inmate, reversing an eleventh-hour pause on her lethal injection that had been ordered by a lower appellate court. The case has quickly become a flashpoint over due process rights for death row prisoners, coming down to the wire as a state execution deadline approached midnight on Wednesday.
Pike’s execution was originally scheduled for Wednesday morning, but the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals stepped in to halt the procedure mid-week to allow additional time to review unresolved legal claims in her case. Within hours of that ruling, Tennessee’s attorney general fast-tracked an emergency appeal to the nation’s highest court, asking justices to immediately vacate the lower court’s stay of execution.
Justices Brett Kavanaugh approved the state’s request to lift the execution pause, with no formal explanation included in the court’s brief order issued Wednesday evening. The Supreme Court’s three-member liberal bloc—Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson—issued a formal dissent against the ruling, marking a sharp ideological split on the high court over the case.
In her written dissent, Sotomayor argued that the majority’s decision improperly allowed Tennessee to move forward with Pike’s execution before her pending legal challenges to her conviction could receive full and fair consideration. “Tennessee’s desire to expedite Pike’s execution by a few days or even weeks cannot outweigh her fundamental interest in her own life,” Sotomayor wrote.
The Supreme Court’s ruling came just a handful of hours before the state’s original execution warrant was set to expire at midnight local time. If the warrant lapses before the execution can be carried out, the Tennessee Supreme Court will be required to schedule a new execution date, the Associated Press reports. As of Thursday morning, no new timeline for the execution had been publicly confirmed.
Pike, now 58, was first convicted and sentenced to death in 1996 for the brutal murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a fellow participant at a job training camp for at-risk teens. Then 18 years old, Pike carried out the killing alongside her then-boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp. If her execution goes forward as cleared by the Supreme Court, she will become the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than two centuries.
The latest legal dispute centers on a contradiction in the state of Tennessee’s courtroom arguments over Pike’s background. For decades, state attorneys insisted in court filings that Pike had fabricated claims of repeated childhood sexual abuse and rape. But during a recent hearing focused on her requested lethal injection method, state representatives confirmed they no longer disputed that the abuse occurred. Pike’s legal team argues that the earlier false claim that she lied about her trauma skewed previous federal reviews of her case, and that a lower court needs to re-examine her claims to correct the record.
This latest ruling comes on the heels of two prior setbacks for Pike this week: the Supreme Court declined to hear a separate appeal challenging her conviction, and Tennessee’s governor rejected her formal request for clemency.