Make New York Post a Preferred Source The US Supreme Court cleared the way for the first female death row inmate to be executed in Tennessee in over 200 years, overturning a stay on Wednesday that was granted just hours before she was set to die by lethal injection.
Christa Pike, now 50, was scheduled to be executed at 10 a.m. CDT Wednesday at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville for murdering a classmate when she was 18 years old in 1995.
Pike, however, was granted a last-minute stay by a federal appeals court just over an hour before she was set to be put to death.
The Court of Appeals ordered the stay based on the convicted killer’s claims that sexual abuse and rape she says she suffered as a child were not properly considered when she was sentenced decades ago.
The order –– which came after witnesses to the execution had already gathered at the prison –– said that the “short stay of execution” was to last “until further order of this court.”
The Tennessee Attorney General’s Office previously told The Post it asked SCOTUS to “lift the stay.”
In the appeal, the attorney general’s office said that halting Pike’s execution at the last minute traumatized the victim’s family and rewarded “abusive delay tactics” by her attorneys.
Tennessee’s execution order expires at midnight, according to Nashville-based attorney Kelley Henry, who is experienced with the state’s death penalty law.
Henry said if time runs out after the stay is lifted, the Tennessee Supreme Court would need to set a new execution date.
Pike was sentenced to death for murdering her Jobs Corps classmate, 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, in a jealous rage because she believed the victim was trying to steal her boyfriend in January 1995, prosecutors said.
Along with her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, 17, and her pal Shadolla Peterson, 18, Pike lured Slemmer to an isolated area of the University of Tennessee’s Knoxville campus to brutally torture and kill her.
Peterson acted as a lookout while the couple carved a pentagram into Slemmer’s chest with a boxcutter, beat her with a meat cleaver and repeatedly slashed her throat while she pleaded for her life.
Investigators said the horrific ordeal — which lasted 30 minutes — ended with Pike killing Slemmer by bashing her head in with a large chunk of asphalt and then keeping a piece of her skull as a souvenir.
In August 2001, Pike got an additional 25 years tacked onto her sentence after she was convicted of attempting to strangle another inmate to death with a shoestring.
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Then, over a decade later, a plot to spring her from the Tennessee Prison for Women in Nashville, involving a corrections officer and a New Jersey personal trainer Pike was in touch with, was thwarted in March 2012.
The convicted murderer said earlier this week she feels a “kinship” with Lindsay Clancy and was “pleased” the accused child killer received a mistrial, the Times of London reported.
“We are both females who got into trouble because of uniquely female issues,” Pike told the publication.
“I was a mentally ill 18-year-old girl who committed a crime with two other individuals and I was the only one to receive this sentence. There are so many women who don’t get the help they need: me and others.”
Pike also requested an all-female lethal injection team carry out her execution, claiming she might be traumatized if men are involved.
