US woman's execution halted an hour before sentence due to be carried out

A US woman due to be executed by lethal injection has won a stay of execution just an hour before her sentence was scheduled to be carried out.

Convicted murderer Christa Pike, 50, would have been the first woman to be executed in the state of Tennessee in at least 200 years.

But a federal appeals court stepped in, ordering a review of whether her allegations of childhood sexual abuse and rape were fully considered when she was sentenced to death by a judge in 1996.

Execution witnesses had already gathered at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville when the order came down at around 9am, local time.

Pike and her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, were convicted of stabbing and beating Colleen Slemmer, a 19-year-old classmate of theirs at a job training facility in the city of Knoxville in 1995.

A pentagram, a star-shaped symbol associated with Satanism, was carved on the victim's body, which along with other elements of the crime, stoked fears of Satan worship during the so-called 'satanic panic' in the country in the 1980s and 1990s.

Pike does not deny killing Slemmer, 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.

Other 18-year-olds sentenced to death in Tennessee have had their sentences vacated, according to assistant federal defender, Stephen Ferrell.

On Tuesday, the US Supreme Court rejected a bid by Pike's lawyers to halt the execution, a day after Tennessee Governor Bill Lee denied her petition for clemency.

In a statement as part of the petition, Pike said she 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".

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It wasn't immediately clear if Tennessee's attorney general, Jonathan Skrmetti, would appeal the decision, or how long the execution might be delayed.

Tennessee has not executed a woman for at least 200 years, according to Robin Maher, of the Death Penalty Information Centre, which said that since 1976, 18 women have been put to death in the US, roughly 1% of all executions.

In 2023, Missouri executed Amber McLaughlin for a 2003 killing, in what is believed to be the first execution of a transgender woman in the country.

Two years earlier, federal authorities executed Lisa Montgomery, marking the first time in nearly seven decades that the US government put a female inmate to death.

(c) Sky News 2026: US woman's execution halted an hour before sentence due to be carried out