Tennessee was set to carry out its first execution of a woman in at least 200 years on Wednesday, but the lethal injection was never carried out. Christa Gail Pike, 50, was convicted in 1996 for the 1995 torture murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer at the University of Tennessee, a case that became known as the Job Corps Murder. According to media witnesses at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, the procedure could not be completed after hours of court back-and-forth.
The legal ping-pong was dramatic. An appeals court halted the execution about an hour before it was scheduled to begin. The U.S. Supreme Court then voted 6-3 to allow it to proceed. But as the hours passed inside the facility, the state was unable to carry out the lethal injection. Pike’s appeals raised claims of child abuse and rape, arguments her attorneys say never received a full hearing. It would have been just the 19th execution of a woman in the United States since 1976.
The case has drawn national attention for both its brutality and its rarity. Female executions make up roughly one percent of all executions in the modern death penalty era, and Tennessee had never carried one out in its recorded history. Two co-defendants in the case were teenagers at the time of the murder.
What do you think should happen next in a case that has spent nearly 30 years in the court system?
