US Supreme Court clears path for Tennessee execution

The US Supreme Court has rejected a last-minute appeal by death-row inmate Christa Pike, clearing the way for her scheduled execution in Tennessee on Wednesday. Pike, 50, is due to receive a lethal injection at 11:00 EDT at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, according to the supplied report. A further legal intervention could still delay the process.

She was convicted of first-degree murder in 1996 and sentenced to death for the killing of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in 1995. Pike was 18 at the time of the crime. Tennessee Governor Bill Lee rejected Pike’s request for clemency on Monday.

Lee said he had reviewed the petition and would not intervene, adding that he was upholding the state’s sentence. Pike’s lawyers argued that her age should have been considered when the sentence was imposed. They also said a history of childhood sexual abuse, abandonment, neglect and severe mental illness had not been fully presented to the jury.

Her attorneys said an 18-year-old brain was not an adult brain and described Pike as a remorseful 50-year-old woman receiving treatment for mental illness. They sought to have the death sentence commuted to life imprisonment. The prosecution case concerned an attack on Slemmer, whom Pike and her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, had met at a training camp for troubled teenagers.

Shipp, who was 17 at the time, received a life sentence with the possibility of parole. If carried out, Pike’s execution would be the first of a woman in Tennessee in more than 200 years. Figures cited by the BBC say 18 women have been executed in the United States since the 1970s, compared with 1,663 men.