Christa Pike Was Just One Hour From Execution When a Federal Court Suddenly Stepped In — Then Everything Changed

Christa Pike was about one hour away from her scheduled execution when everything suddenly changed.

On September 30, the 50-year-old was scheduled to die by lethal injection at 10 a.m. at Riverbend Maximum Security Insтιтution in Nashville.

The preparations were underway.

Then the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals intervened.

In a 2-1 decision, the federal appeals court issued a stay of execution, saying it needed additional time to consider a dispute over Pike’s latest federal filing and her earlier habeas proceedings.

Pike had spent nearly three decades on death row for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer.

For several hours, the stay appeared to have given Pike an unexpected reprieve.

But Tennessee immediately appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Later that day, the Supreme Court vacated the stay and cleared the way for Tennessee to proceed with the execution.

The story then took an even more extraordinary turn.

Tennessee administered two doses of pentobarbital, but Pike remained alive. The execution attempt was eventually halted, and she was transported to a hospital in critical condition.

My take: The federal court’s intervention changed Pike’s fate with only about an hour remaining, but only temporarily. What followed became an extraordinary sequence of court rulings and a failed execution attempt that left Tennessee facing new legal and procedural questions.