Tennessee officials were unable to put Christa Pike to death for a 1995 murder, media witnesses said, after the lethal injection was halted for hours as courts considered a last-minute appeal of what would have been the state’s first execution of a woman in at least 200 years.

Pike, 50, had been scheduled for execution on Wednesday for a killing she committed at age 18 after the US Supreme Court overturned an appeals court ruling that stopped the lethal injection just an hour before it was to start. Officials then attempted to go ahead with it as planned.

Officials appeared to give Pike two doses of pentobarbital.

At 7.46pm prison officials closed the curtain to the media room. They raised the curtain three minutes later. Pike could be heard loudly snoring, and the curtain was closed again at 8.06pm.

Pike continued to be heard snoring behind the closed curtain until the microphone was cut off at about 8.53 p.m. At that time there was an announcement to escort media witnesses out of the area.

Lawyers for Pike filed an emergency motion late on Wednesday with the US Supreme Court seeking to immediately halt and stay the execution, saying she was in “unnecessary agony” and it was violating her right to be executed free of cruel and unusual punishment. They also filed motions in the Sixth Circuit court and district court.

The motion also asserted that the Department of Correction should begin lifesaving measures. “Failure to provide such care constitutes deliberate indifference to legitimate, serious medical needs.”

Pike and her boyfriend were convicted of the fatal stabbing and beating in 1995 of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, their classmate at a job training facility in Knoxville. The case garnered widespread attention in part because a pentagram that was carved on Slemmer’s body and other elements of the crime stoked fears of Satan worship during the “satanic panic” of the 1980s and 1990s.

Pike was initially scheduled to be put to death in the morning, and witnesses had gathered at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville when the 6th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals voted 2-1 to issue a stay. That court said a delay was needed to consider whether Pike’s allegations of childhood sexual abuse were fully considered at her sentencing.

The attorney general’s office appealed to the Supreme Court, saying that halting the execution at the last moment traumatised Slemmer’s family and rewarded “abusive delay tactics” by Pike’s attorneys.

Later in the day, the high court cleared the way for the execution to proceed. The conservative majority did not explain their order, while the three liberal members signed a dissent that said Pike’s claims deserved a closer look.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in the dissent that the decision to vacate the stay interfered with the Sixth Circuit court’s handling of the case and “unnecessarily prevents that court from giving due consideration to Pike’s claim”.

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

After 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 realise 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,” she said in a statement. (AP)



Edited by Robert Kemp