SIXTH CIRCUIT HALTS EXECUTION OF CHRISTA PIKE

A federal appeals court halted Christa Pike's execution roughly an hour before she was due to die by lethal injection on Wednesday. The US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit granted a stay to review whether Pike's allegations of childhood sexual abuse were properly considered at sentencing. Her attorney said the stay reflected "serious concerns" about the execution, which the court said was halted "until further order of this court." Pike, the only woman on Tennessee's death row, would have become the first woman executed in the state in more than 200 years.

Pike was sentenced to death in 1996 for the 1995 murder of her classmate Colleen Slemmer at a job training facility in Knoxville, committed when Pike was 18. She and her then-boyfriend were convicted of beating, torturing and stabbing Slemmer to death; a pentagram was carved into her body, which Pike denies doing herself. Two other residents at the facility later testified that Pike boasted about the killing afterwards. Tennessee Governor Bill Lee denied Pike clemency on Monday, and the US Supreme Court separately declined to halt the execution.

Pike's attorneys argued she was too young to be sentenced to death, saying an 18-year-old brain is not an adult brain, and cited a history of severe sexual abuse. Assistant Federal Defender Stephen Ferrell said Pike's sentence was an outlier, as other 18-year-olds sentenced to death in Tennessee have since had their sentences vacated. Pike said in a clemency statement that she had been "a mentally ill 18-year-old kid" who took years to grasp what she had done. The Sixth Circuit's stay leaves Pike's case under review, with no confirmed new execution date.