Execution of US murderer halted one hour before it was due to happen

The execution of a woman on death row has been halted just one hour before it was scheduled to go ahead at a prison in the south-eastern United States.

Christa Gail Pike has been in a Tennessee prison for 30 years after her murder conviction back in 1996 when she was aged 18.

Her execution was paused as a federal appeals court reviews whether her allegations of childhood sexual abuse and rape were fully considered at her sentencing.

Pike, now 50, and her boyfriend were convicted of the 1995 stabbing and beating of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, their classmate at a job training centre in Knoxville. She would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in at least 200 years.

The case captured widespread attention at the time of the killing in part because a pentagram (a five-pointed star shape) that was carved on Slemmer’s body and other elements of the crime stoked fears of Satan worship during the “satanic panic” in the US during the 1980s and 1990s.

After the stay was granted, Tennessee’s attorney general immediately appealed to the US Supreme Court. Witnesses and media remained at the prison in case the high court allows the execution to proceed.

Pike’s lawyers said not considering what happened to her growing up violates any view of fairness with executions.

“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,” they wrote.

Pike does not deny committing the killing, but her supporters argue the state should consider Pike’s age at the time, mental illness and a history of severe sexual abuse that included being raped from the time she was a toddler.

Following the killing, Pike was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. In her clemency petition, she said she only wanted to fight Slemmer but killed her in a frenzied attack when she couldn’t “put the brakes on.”

“I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid. It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I’d done. Even more to accept how many lives I affected. I took the life of someone’s child, sister, friend. It sickens me now to think I had the ability to commit such a crime,” Pike said in a statement.

Slemmer’s mother wants the lethal injection to go forward, saying she has waited decades to see Pike’s sentence carried out.

“Every time I think about it, I think about Colleen feeling that pain and trying to get up and run,” May Martinez told The Associated Press last Saturday.

Since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, 18 women have been put to death in the US, representing about 1 per cent of all executions, according to the  Death Penalty Information Centre.