US Supreme Court allows Christa Pike’s execution in Tennessee to go forward

Christa Pike pictured in 2023 (TDOC via AP)

The US Supreme Court is allowing the execution of Christa Gail Pike to go forward, overturning a last-minute stay issued by an appeals court hours earlier.

Pike, 50, had been scheduled to die by lethal injection on Wednesday morning, and witnesses had already gathered at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville when the 6th Circuit US Court of Appeals voted 2-1 to issue a stay.

That court said a delay was needed to consider whether Pike’s allegations of childhood sexual abuse were fully considered at her sentencing.

Pike was 18 when classmate Colleen Slemmer was beaten and stabbed to death.

The case garnered widespread attention at the time in part because a pentagram that was carved on Ms Slemmer’s body and other elements of the crime stoked fears of Satan worship during the “satanic panic” of the 1980s and 1990s.