Supreme Court rules Tennessee can execute Christa Pike after lower court issues stay

The Supreme Court lifted a stay on Wednesday night that delayed the execution of a female inmate on death row in Tennessee, ruling the execution can move forward if it’s carried out before midnight local time.Christa Pike, who was 18-years-old in 1995 when she murdered former classmate Colleen Slemmer, was scheduled to be executed Wednesday morning, but it was delayed after an appeals court stayed the execution.
The Supreme Court, however, vacated the stay in a 6-3 decision, at the request of the Tennessee Attorney General’s Office, according to USA Today.
Pike’s attorneys have argued that she was young at the time of the crime and suffered from an untreated mental illness after a childhood of brutal sexual abuse and she would not be given the same sentence if the crime occurred today.
“It is inconceivable that in the 21st century, the criminal justice system is poised to execute a survivor of rape and child sexual abuse whose jury never had the opportunity to consider those facts in weighing the defendant’s moral culpability,” the attorneys wrote. “That the courts would allow her execution to proceed without giving full weight to these facts is unfathomable.”
The Tennessee Attorney General’s Office argued that Slemmer’s family had waited long enough for justice to be carried out and the execution should be allowed to be carried out as planned.
“As Colleen’s mother recently said, ‘Thirty-one years is long enough,'” the state wrote. “The Court should vacate the stay of execution to avoid rewarding Pike’s abusive delay tactics, to prevent further trauma to Colleen’s family, and to protect Tennessee’s grave sovereign interest in the execution of its exhaustively reviewed judgment.” 
Misty Severi is a news reporter for Just The News. You can follow her on X for more coverage.

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