US court halts execution of woman on death row at eleventh-hour

A US appeals court on Wednesday halted the execution of death row inmate Christa Pike in Tennessee, less than two hours before she was scheduled to become the first woman that state has put to death in more than two hundred years.

The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered a "short stay of ‌execution" to give it time to weigh Pike's claim that her allegations of childhood sexual abuse were not adequately considered during her sentencing. The court did not provide a specific timeframe.

Pike, whose clemency petition highlighting childhood trauma and sexual abuse was denied by Governor Bill Lee, would be the only person in the modern era of US capital punishment to be executed in Tennessee for a crime committed as a teenager.

The Tennessee attorney general's office immediately asked the US Supreme Court to vacate the stay order.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected an 11th-hour bid for a stay of execution, which is set to take place at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, the ⁠state capital.

Pike, now 50, was 18 in January 1995 when she, a 17-year-old boyfriend and a third companion lured 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a classmate at their Knoxville Job Corps vocational center, into a wooded area where they tortured and killed her.

The grisly nature of the slaying, which involved the perpetrators carving the shape of a pentagram in the victim's chest and taking a chunk of her skull as a souvenir of the carnage, drew intense media coverage at the time.