Colleen Slemmer begged for her life while her killers carved a pentagram into her chest.
Three decades later, a federal appeals court tried to save the woman who killed her with a last-minute stay.
Then the Supreme Court made a call that changed everything, just hours before midnight.
Appeals Judges Bought Pike Two Extra Hours Before SCOTUS Stepped In
Christa Gail Pike was set to die by lethal injection Wednesday morning at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution.
She would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee since 1819.
Instead, a divided three-judge panel on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals froze the execution at 8:17 a.m. – with Pike's lethal injection set for 10 a.m. that same morning.
The panel claimed it simply needed more time to review Pike's claims.
Tennessee wasn't interested in giving her more time.
The state's Attorney General's Office raced to the Supreme Court within hours, accusing Pike's lawyers of "abusive delay tactics" at a grieving family's expense.
By Wednesday evening, the full Supreme Court agreed and vacated the stay.
Pike's execution was back on.
Sotomayor Focused on Procedure While a Mother Waited Thirty Years
Justice Sonia Sotomayor didn't like the outcome, and she wasn't quiet about it.
She wrote that the majority's decision "unnecessarily prevents" the Sixth Circuit from fully considering Pike's claim.
Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson signed their names to that dissent.
Nowhere in it is Colleen Slemmer's name.
Nowhere in it is her mother, who flew in from Florida on money a support group helped raise just to witness the execution she'd waited three decades for.
Pike beat, slashed, and tortured Slemmer for roughly half an hour back in 1995.
She used a box cutter and a meat cleaver to do it, while her boyfriend carved a pentagram into Slemmer's chest.
Pike kept a piece of Slemmer's crushed skull as a trophy, showing it off at breakfast the next morning.
Slemmer's mother didn't ask the Supreme Court for a seminar on appellate procedure.
She asked for the sentence a Knoxville jury handed down in 1996.
Three justices decided the process mattered more than keeping that promise.
This Is Exactly What the Shadow Docket Exists For
Liberal justices call the Supreme Court's emergency docket a dangerous, lawless "shadow docket" every single time it doesn't go their way.
The same three justices dissented in September 2024 when the Court let Missouri execute Marcellus Williams over the objections of his own prosecutor and DNA evidence that cast doubt on his guilt.
That dissent got quoted everywhere for about a day, and Missouri executed Williams anyway.
Pike's case is tracking the identical pattern: a liberal dissent gets its moment in print, and the execution proceeds regardless.
Pike confessed.
Pike bragged about the murder to her classmates the next morning.
Pike carried literal proof of what she'd done in her pocket.
No appellate panel was ever going to discover new evidence that changes a single one of those facts.
Pike's lawyers leaned hard on her age, arguing she was 18 when she killed Slemmer and deserved mercy because of it.
The 1996 jury already knew she was 18 and sentenced her to die anyway.
Eighteen was old enough to lure a classmate into the woods with a promise of marijuana.
Eighteen was old enough to swing a meat cleaver for thirty straight minutes.
Eighteen was old enough to watch Slemmer suffer for half an hour and still carry home a piece of her skull.
A defendant doesn't get to claim adulthood's freedoms and then demand a child's excuse once the bill comes due.
What the Sixth Circuit's stay actually bought Pike's lawyers was a few more hours to hunt for a technicality, nothing more.
The Supreme Court saw it for exactly what it was, and shut it down before midnight.
Colleen Slemmer's mother got the only thing she ever asked Tennessee for.
Sources:
- Michael Ruiz and Brittany Miller, "Supreme Court clears way for teen killer's execution after last-minute reprieve," Fox News, September 30, 2026.
- Sister Toldjah, "SCOTUS Ruling Clears Path for Tennessee Convicted Murderer Christa Pike's Execution," RedState, September 30, 2026.
- Jack, "JUST IN: Supreme Court Vacates Last-Minute Stay, Clears Way For Christa Pike Execution," 100 Percent Fed Up, September 30, 2026.
- Application to Vacate Stay of Execution, Pike v. Tennessee, Supreme Court of the United States, filed September 30, 2026.
