The Supreme Court Cleared the Way to Execute a Woman Tennessee Hadn't Killed in 200 Years

On Tuesday night the US Supreme Court denied Christa Pike's application for a stay, offering no explanation, as courts almost never do when they let a killing proceed. Wednesday morning Tennessee executed her by lethal injection at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville — the first woman the state has put to death in two centuries, and the only person executed in Tennessee's modern era for a crime committed as a minor.

Pike was 18 when she and two co-defendants killed 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in 1995. Nobody who has looked at this case disputes that it was a horrific crime. What the state's own pre-trial position disputed was whether it deserved a death sentence at all: before trial, Tennessee itself was reportedly willing to resolve the case with life without parole. Pike's lawyers say that offer never reached her properly, that her defense never presented the jury with the childhood of documented rape and physical abuse that produced the person who committed this crime, and that thirty years, an untreated-then-diagnosed combination of PTSD and bipolar disorder, and a stable disciplinary record since should count for something when a governor is deciding whether the state still needs to kill her. Governor Bill Lee decided it did. The Supreme Court agreed, in the customary silence.

That silence is the point. A one-line denial closes the last venue where anyone was required to explain, on the record, why executing this particular 50-year-old woman for what an 18-year-old did serves any purpose beyond finality. "Finality and closure for surviving victims" is what the state argued instead — a real and understandable harm, but also the same argument that justifies killing regardless of the facts of any individual case, because finality by definition doesn't need facts. It only needs a date.

Pike's execution isn't an isolated data point — it's part of a machine that restarted hard. After a decade in which US executions never cracked 30 a year, and a 2021 low of just 11 amid pandemic delays and a federal moratorium, 2025 saw 47 executions, nearly double 2024's total and the highest count since 2010. Florida alone carried out 19 of them — 40 percent of the national total, the most it has executed in a single year since reinstating the death penalty in 1976. Outside Florida the numbers barely moved. This is not a national mood shift toward more executions; it's what happens when one state's governor decides to stop signing reprieves and start signing warrants. Capital punishment in America was never a neutral machine responding to crime rates — it is a lever a handful of governors and courts pull or don't, and 2025 shows exactly how fast the body count moves when they choose to pull it.

Abolitionists have spent a decade watching execution numbers fall and reading that decline as momentum. Pike's case, and Florida's 2025 run, are the reminder that the infrastructure never went anywhere — the gurneys, the drug protocols, the willing courts, the governors who campaign on being tough on crime. It only takes one administration deciding the moratorium era is over to fill it back up. The fight was never won; it was paused, and only where someone in power chose to pause it.

Sources

The Hill: Supreme Court declines to stop Christa Pike's execution
WATE: Tennessee Supreme Court declines to stay execution of Christa Pike
Death Penalty Information Center: The Death Penalty in 2025 — Executions