Arabic version: محكمة توقف إعدام كريستا بايك في تينيسي

According to The Guardian, a federal appeals court halted Tennessee’s planned execution of Christa Pike on Wednesday morning, about an hour before it was scheduled to take place. The execution would have been Tennessee’s first of a woman in 200 years. Pike had been set to die by lethal injection at 11am ET.

The appeals court issued a short stay in a 2-1 decision after earlier refusals of clemency appeals by Tennessee’s governor and the state supreme court. The court said the interests of justice and the finality of Pike’s impending execution required a short stay to analyze the parties’ fully briefed arguments and decide the issues on their merits.

Pike, now 50, was convicted of murder in the 1995 killing of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a classmate at Knoxville Job Corps. Pike was 18 at the time, and her boyfriend was 17. The case drew nationwide attention because of the ages of those involved and because a satanic symbol was carved into Slemmer’s chest.

Jonathan Skrmetti’s office, representing the Tennessee attorney general, said it would continue advocating for the lawfully imposed sentence while courts considered what it called a technical issue. The office said last-minute objections following decades of litigation in numerous courts were common in capital cases and that it was asking the US supreme court to lift the stay. The Guardian said it had contacted the office of Governor Bill Lee.