Tennessee can execute lone woman on death row, Supreme Court rules, after lower court had paused it

Tennessee can carry out its planned execution of the lone woman on death row after the Supreme Court vacated a lower court’s Wednesday morning order that had temporarily blocked the move.

The high court’s decision hours later caps a flurry of last-minute legal maneuvering in a bid by convicted murderer Christa Pike’s legal team to spare her life. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.

About an hour before her scheduled execution at 10 a.m. local time in Nashville, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth District said it needed to review claims made by her lawyers. At issue was whether Pike can reopen a court proceeding centered around her allegations that she was sexually abused beginning when she was a child — abuse that the state did not dispute at a special hearing in August.

The appeals court in a split decision agreed to a “short” reprieve halting her execution “in order to properly analyze the parties’ fully briefed arguments and resolve the issues on the merits.”

In turn, the state attorney general’s office asked the Supreme Court to intervene, arguing that the execution must go on to “avoid rewarding Pike’s abusive delay tactics.”

In…

Original source: https://www.nbcnews.com/business