A federal appeals court halted the execution of Christa Gail Pike around an hour before it was scheduled to start on Sept. 30 at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tennessee.
The scheduled lethal injection would have made Pike, 50, the first woman in Tennessee to be executed in at least 200 years.
But the 10:00 a.m. execution was paused on Wednesday after a federal appeals court requested more time to determine whether Pike’s history of childhood sexual abuse was fully presented when a jury sentenced her to death in 1996.
Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti asked the U.S. Supreme Court to lift a last-minute Sixth Circuit stay and allow the state to carry out Pike’s execution on Wednesday….