US Supreme Court allows execution of Christa Pike to go ahead
8 minutes ago
The US Supreme Court has cleared the way for death row inmate Christa Pike to become the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.
The justices overturned a last-minute reprieve that was granted by an appeals court on Wednesday morning about an hour before Pike, 50, was due to be put to death.
Tennessee's attorney general had asked the Supreme Court to overrule the lower court. Pike was sentenced to death in 1996 for the murder of Colleen Slemmer.
She was 18 when she and her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, beat, tortured and killed the 19-year-old, whom they met at a job training camp for troubled teens.
Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a conservative, granted Wednesday evening's application to vacate the stay of the execution. No explanation was provided in the order.
The top court's three liberal justices - Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson - dissented.
Sotomayor wrote that the decision cleared the way for Tennessee to execute Pike before her pending legal challenges to her conviction "can be properly considered".
"Tennessee's desire to expedite Pike's execution by a few days or even weeks cannot outweigh her 'fundamental interest in [her] own life," she said.
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