Reason death row inmate Christa Pike’s execution was halted an hour before it was due to happen

Christa Pike’s execution was halted just one hour before she was scheduled to be put to death.

ennessee death row inmate Christa Pike was granted a last-minute reprieve, with an appeals court stopping her execution, according to the BBC. She has spent nearly three decades on death row.

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals said Wednesday that it needed additional time to consider arguments raised in Pike’s case. The judges did not say how long the stay would remain in place.

The decision came after a series of legal setbacks for Pike earlier this week. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene, while Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee rejected Pike’s request for clemency, according to the BBC.

But her attorneys continued fighting, raising concerns about the state’s position on Pike’s history of sexual abuse and the method Tennessee planned to use to execute her.

According to Pike’s lawyers, Tennessee had spent years arguing in court that Pike fabricated claims that she was sexually abused.

That position changed during a recent hearing, when the state said it did not dispute that Pike had been sexually abused and raped.

Pike’s attorneys subsequently asked the appeals court to return their motion to a lower federal court. They argued that if previous federal decisions had relied on Tennessee’s earlier position that Pike was lying about the abuse, that could have affected the federal review of her case

Christa Pike’s execution halted
The legal challenge that resulted in Wednesday’s stay was separate from the appeal Pike brought before the Supreme Court, which declined to hear her case.

Instead, it centered on Tennessee’s lethal injection protocol. Pike’s lawyers argued that the state’s execution procedures could expose her to unnecessary suffering, which they said would violate constitutional protections. They also claimed Tennessee’s procedures had prevented Pike from having a meaningful opportunity to establish that the method could cause unconstitutional pain.

Christa Pike has spent nearly three decades on death row after being convicted for the 1995 murder of her classmate Colleen Slemmer.

Pike, along with her then-boyfriend and a third friend, lured Slemmer into the woods where they beat and stabbed her to death. Pike was 18 at the time, and her conviction made her the youngest woman in modern US history to receive a death sentence.

Pike’s attorneys have separately argued that her age should have prevented her from receiving a death sentence, pointing to research on adolescent brain development. Her legal team has said that “an 18-year-old brain is not an adult brain